SwitchBack: A Paranormal Werewolf Romance (Knightsbridge Canyon Series Book 1) Read online

  SWITCHBACK

  A New Adult Werewolf and Paranormal Romance

  Knightsbridge Canyon Series Book 1

  by

  Drew VanDyke

  and

  David VanDyke

  © Copyright 2013 by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical or otherwise) without prior written permission and consent from the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  SPECIAL LIMITED TIME OFFER:

  Click the link below to sign up for exclusive insider emails

  and get your FREE copy of

  Reaper's Run: Plague Wars Series Book 1.

  CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED

  Prologue

  Dear Diary:

  Life is really a pain in the butt right now.

  Now, before you start going off on me, let me tell you that this pain is not metaphorical. It’s not merely because I’ve been relegated to staying with my identical twin sister back in our hometown of Knightsbridge, California, for the first time in years, or having to figure out how I feel about my old boyfriend Will.

  No, this pain is due to some overenthusiastic animal control officer with a dart gun, plus poor adherence to Steam Room Sterilization and Sanitization Techniques by an unnamed resort and spa somewhere near the border of Idaho and Washington State.

  So, armed with a secret I can’t tell my other half and a chunk taken out of my derriere that hurts like a son of a bitch, I’m playing invalid to my own twin version of holiday misery.

  Let’s just hope we make it to Christmas alive.

  Chapter 1

  “Ashlee Scott! Get that ruler away from your rear end!” My usually sweetness-and-light twin sister Amber grabbed it out of my hand before I could take care of the itch I’d been dealing with all day.

  “Amber, you give me back that ruler or so help me…”

  “What? Like you’re gonna take me? In your condition?” Amber smiled and turned to her partner Elle, who was planted on the plush and comfy davenport, remote control in hand, trying to catch up on NFL scores. Elle was in her late thirties, which kinda made Amber a trophy chick, I guess. Booby prize, maybe?

  “Honey?” My twin flashed Elle that dazzling Scott smile.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Elle wryly dribbled from the side of her mouth without taking her eyes from the split screen ESPN channel. “I am not falling for that one again.”

  Amber furrowed her brow, frustrated for the moment.

  “Amb, don’t frown,” I said, mock-sweet. “You’ll need to get Botox before you’re thirty.”

  My sister turned to me with a flip of the bob she had going this week and sighed. “And you need to keep all sharp objects away from your rear. At least until that butt wound…”

  “Bullet wound!” I interrupted.

  “Fine. Bullet wound. Only you would manage to get shot in the ass by a hunter’s ricochet, hiking around in God-Knows-Where, Idaho.”

  That was my story, anyway.

  My twin tossed her head again and rolled her eyes. “Until that heals…” She turned to J.R., her five-year-old son, my nephew, and tickled him.

  Seriously, who names their kid after a nighttime soap opera character from the eighties? Okay, it was short for John Robert, but still. At least it wasn’t “Junior.”

  “We’re locking up the cutlery until your Aunt Ashlee is all healed up,” Amber said. J.R. giggled as my sister tickled him. Then Elle decided to join in on the fun and took playful swats at him with the rolled-up sports section while he shrieked in fun.

  I, on the other hand, seized the moment’s distraction to drag myself painfully upstairs to my room – well, the guest bedroom I occupied – while the girls got domestic. Yuck. Sometimes being around the Gordon-Scotts was so sugary I thought I’d develop a whole mouthful of cavities.

  I tried to sit on the bed, but having to favor one cheek didn’t make things easy, so I rolled over and lay on my stomach. Besides, it still itched like crazy…and then came a knock at the door.

  “Hey, Sis.” Amber poked her head in. “You know, the sooner you heal up, the sooner you can be back doing what you love to do.”

  I cocked my head, threw back my own Jennifer Aniston locks, the ones that somehow managed to put Amber’s to shame despite sharing a gene set, and said, faux-sweetly, “Don’t worry. I’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

  Amber’s eyes narrowed. I knew she’d get the dig. She wasn’t happy with her latest stylist and it took time for her hair to grow out. We both used to have the same length tresses, but this year she’d opted for what was supposed to be a hot shoulder-length bob, and it just wasn’t quite working the way she wanted it to.

  Trying to recover, she turned and tossed over her shoulder, “Yes, well. Remember what I always say.” She looked back just as I was pushing the door closed with my foot, which in turn pressed on her retreating Bebe-branded ass.

  “I know, I know. Guests are like fish and family.” I smiled back at her.

  We finished in unison, “They both stink after three days.”

  “Remember what else they say?” I yelled as she retreated down the hall.

  “What’s that?” my sister yelled back.

  “You can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your family.”

  “That makes no freaking sense. Kleenex!”

  Sigh. By the time I get out of here, I’ll probably be ripe as rotten fruit and smell just as bad. So, tell me, God, what the hell did I do to deserve this?

  No answer.

  Chapter 2

  There comes a time in every girl’s day when she’s just gotta sit down and scratch. Make that in every bitch’s day, when she’s just gotta…even if her ass hurts like a sonofabitch. I’ll spare you the details.

  See, I’m a werewolf.

  Scratch that. No, it’s not supposed to be a pun. Never mind. Okay, strike that. I’m technically a lupine. A lycanthrope, some might say.

  I had researched the subject after my first change, and gorged myself on as many werewolf tales as I could get my hands on. In my favorite, the goddess Hera was supposed to have made twin girls into wolves to protect a Thracian poet as he wandered the Earth spouting prophecy and oracles to the masses, until they fell prey to the wiles of Romulus and Remus. Something like that anyway. Hey, I’m not a big reader of the classics.

  Well, there isn’t any Thracian poet in my life, and the only oracle I consult is my daily horoscope when I want an uneasy laugh, and I’m sure not wandering th
e Earth as much as I’d like to right now. No, the closest thing to any Thracian poet I know is my editor, and he’s not too happy with me lately as my galleys keep coming back redlined with chunks of text missing.

  See, I’m a travel writer. Ashlee Marie Scott by name and pen. Twenty-nevermind years old, and terminally single according to my dead mother. Unlike, that is, my vacuous sister Amber Michelle, who got married young and had a son before deciding she wanted to bat for the other team. I might have that out of order, but you get the idea. They divorced and then she fell in love with a lesbian chief-of-police-turned-high-powered-city-attorney. Makes her, well, whatever. In love, I guess. I wouldn’t know. Never really been. Not for sure.

  I, on the other hand, specialize in luxury health spas of the high seas and high mountains, the cities and the coasts. My latest find had me a third-world country, also known as Idaho, with a wicked staph infection and an HMO surgical team determined to turn a pound of flesh into an ounce of cure. Thus, as I mentioned before, I am now grounded, stuck in my hometown of Knightsbridge, California, staying with my sister, her partner and my five-year-old nephew in a house that could be photographed at any time of the night or day for Good Housekeeping.

  Not my idea of comfortable living: a place for everything and everything in its place. I’m more the bra-on-the-doorknob kind of girl, at my loft back in the City.

  Did I tell you that I hate my sister even while loving her? No, really I do. She’s perfect. Even my parents think so. Except for the fact that she’s bisexual in a lesbian phase, but they’re slowly coming around to that, too.

  Oh, did I tell you I’m also a werewolf? Right. I did. Must be the medication. Snort. Wonder how that one’s gonna go over with the in-laws? Oh, right. I don’t have any. Never mind. So, let’s just say, at certain times of the month, Mother Nature’s even more of a bitch with me than with most women.

  I’m sure you’re wondering about that bullet wound, so I’ll tell you a long story short before the short story gets long.

  I was doing a piece on Pacific Northwest spas. Hardship, yeah, but the job paid diddly squat so I might as well enjoy the expense account. Besides: cold, bad. Heat, good, and every now and then I meet a cute guy. I mean, I can rock a bikini with the best of them, and nobody expects me to have perfect makeup in a spa.

  But I digress.

  For the story I got the full package, comped for the magazine of course. Steak and lobster, Eggs Benedict, and one of everything on the spa menu. It was glorious. I took pictures and my editor got his five thousand words, for which he paid me almost nothing, but that was the deal. Live high on the magazine’s dime, cheap on my own.

  The resorts all knew who I was, of course, and were happy to oblige. How else would I get the freebies? And I wasn’t writing exposés after all. My job was to sell magazines, whether print or online editions, which sold advertisements to paying customers.

  Long story short, yeah, yeah.

  So I worked my way through lockers, changing rooms and the amenities therein to the pools. I did a full set of lap work to check the workout box for the day and then, ah, the fun started. Sauna, cold dunk, heat lamp, cold dunk, steam bath with herbal infusion, and so on. Wonderful. After that came a mud bath, hot rock massage, lunch at the wine bar, mani-pedi, facial – you get the picture. Most fun a girl can have alone.

  I spend a lot of time alone, I guess.

  On the afternoon in question, I hurried upstairs to my room and banged out a rough draft, quick and dirty because tonight was MoonFall; that is, a full moon, which for me makes the usual girl’s monthlies seem hella tame. Anyway, I packed my day pack – okay, night pack – with the stuff I’d need – change of clothes, wipes, water and food, handheld GPS – what a godsend – and so on.

  My usual MO was to hike to a landmark before sunset, like a mountaintop or tip of a lake, load it into the GPS, clip the little unit to a collar and put it on. Then I’d have a nice dinner, a tiny fire if I could, get naked and wait for the change.

  After doing it for years, I was pretty lucid in wolf form, but I could easily get distracted, which was where the GPS came in, just in case I changed back somewhere other than the campsite. It would help me sneak in the buff across country to my stash. Either way, I’d clean up and get back to the other twenty-seven days of my life before the next change.

  This time, though, someone had shot me with a tranquilizer dart, in the middle of the night no less. Who does that? No idea, never found out, don’t want to know. Narcotics don’t work well on me in wolf form, by the way, which was why I didn’t go down. Nothing less than a bear dose would probably do it. I managed to make it back without trouble.

  The next morning I did the steam room, and then the infection showed up. I made up a story about a hunter’s ricochet and went to the ER expecting to be sent on my way with antibiotics, but they said it was a drug-resistant strain so boom, straight into surgery. From the way it felt afterward, the surgeon used a steak knife and an ice cream scoop to excise the necrotizing tissue. They told me they got it all, and shot me full of the latest thing, gave me pills to take and orders for a regimen of bleach baths for the next three weeks.

  I was able to get three more free days at the resort by hinting that the infection was their fault, caught from the steam room bench, but eventually I had to go recuperate where assistance was near. Among my relatives, Amber was my best choice. I really do love her, you know, even if we are like oil and vinegar. We may taste great together but we still don’t mix very well.

  Want to guess who’s the oil, and who’s the vinegar?

  Chapter 3

  I watched Amber primping in the mirror, envious as sin. She’d bought this darling new turquoise collection from Sephora and was wearing some Jimmy Choos that I would have killed to afford. Sigh.

  Don’t ever let any of those sparkly werewolf books or movies fool you. Unless our injuries are cured by some kind of magic, we also have to heal over time. Oh, it may happen faster, especially in wolf form, but when it comes to infections, colds and viruses, we’re just like the rest of you. And since I was trapped at home nursing an oozing sore, I was stuck with what the girls had on disc in the den or what J.R. had in his bedroom. Hell, I could always play Singstar, but a girl gets tired of hearing the sound of her own voice. I had my phone, but as I paid for the data myself, I had to go easy on it when I wasn't working and able to expense it.

  I couldn’t even figure out how to work the streaming TV channels, and the only internet this retro household had was a cheap hotspot from five years ago. I think Elle deliberately made everything complicated so nobody could mess with her sports.

  “So, where you going tonight?” I asked as Amber put herself together.

  “Oh. Nothing special,” she answered. “Elle has this charity function sponsored by the Animal Rights Coalition.”

  “Animal Rights?” I sneered. “What about people’s rights? I mean, some of us treat our dogs better than we treat each other. Don’t we Spanky?” I threw that last bit out at the miniature Schnauzer who sat in the doorway staring up at Amber’s transformation. I turned back to watch my sister go from beautiful to breathtaking in the Clairol-quality lighting over the mirror. She’d mesmerized me ever since I was child with her ability to use makeup in its most subtle and glamorous ways.

  “That’s because Spanky’s special,” Amber singsonged. “Aren’t you, Spanky?”

  He barked in response and his stubby tail began to wiggle.

  Amber sighed and touched up her lips with a darling cinnamon custard. “Don’t think you’re missing anything. Just a lot of ho-hum and small talk. You’d find it very boring. I know I will.”

  “Hey, hey, now,” Elle said. I watched her look over from where she stood putting on a few last touches of her own in the other mirror. His and hers…I mean, hers and hers mirrors; it was so decadent. “I’m standing right here, you know.”

  Amber launched another of her dazzling smiles and gave Elle a peck on the cheek as she exite
d the master bath. I followed, feeling frumpy in my Jaclyn Smith flannel cotton white PJs with the intersecting black, blue, and brown stripes down the side.

  “Besides, Jeanetta Macdonald will be there and she can’t help but seethe whenever she sees me. Just another perk for looking like you, Ashlee,” Amber skewered.

  Shane’s sister, I thought. Crap. I was hoping she’d get out of this town so I wouldn’t have to remember. The truth was, I didn’t have to remember, at least not right now, so I flipped a switch in my head and chose to think of other things.

  “Anyway, I’m sure you can keep yourself occupied for a couple of hours by yourself. J.R.’s over at his Dad’s and Mervin won’t be bringing him back till the morning.” Amber strode forward out of the bedroom, down the stairs to the landing, and almost fell down the steps.

  “Damn it, J.R.!” She shot into the air as she grabbed for the banister. “Honey!” she yelled. “Did I or did I not tell J.R. to move his things from off the stairs?”

  “You did.” Elle’s voice came out of the bedroom. When it came to raising J.R., Elle was pretty hands-off.

  “I thought so.” Amber shook the exasperation from her eyes and smiled. “Kids. They may just be the death of me.” She bundled up the nylon jacket that J.R. had left on the floor and tossed it into the laundry room around the corner.

  “Elle? You ready?”

  “Hold your horses, woman!” Elle snapped from the bedroom. “I’m coming.”

  I strangled a laugh. “Ah, domestic bliss.”

  Amber glared and carefully flounced down the hallway.

  “Yeah, well, don’t you worry, sister.” Elle sucker-punched me in the arm as she breezed by. “Your time will come soon and then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it!” I yelled from my position at the top of the staircase, cradling my elbow.