Monstrous Intent, page 1
MONSTROUS INTENT
MISCHIEF AND MAYHEM
BOOK 1
ALICE WINTERS
Copyright © 2022 by Alice Winters
All rights reserved.
Edited by Courtney Bassett
Proofed by Lori Parks
Formatted by Leslie Copeland
Cover by Cate Ashwood Designs
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.
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
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alice Winters
CHAPTER ONE
DECLAN
Life is normal. I am normal. I’m very normal.
“Help! Please! Help!”
I’m a normal man waiting at a normal park for my normal date while wearing my normal button-down with my normal nice jeans.
“Someone, help!”
We’re going to go to a normal restaurant where we’ll eat normal food and—
“I can see you standing there, fucking help me!” the man screams.
With a sigh, I involuntarily look over at the man who has somehow climbed onto the restroom roof. Honestly, if he has those skills, he should be able to handle the monster currently trying to climb up the building wall to get to him.
“You look fine! I don’t think it can jump up there,” I say.
The creature in question is four-legged, appearing almost like a dog, but it’s quite clear with just a look that it’s the furthest thing from one. Its black body is scaly and as it moves under the light of the nearby lamppost, it seems almost iridescent. It’s larger than a German shepherd, but in the realm of things not natural, it’s on the smaller side.
“Dammit, help me!” the man yells. “Are you seriously just going to sit there and watch?”
“I was planning on it!” I say as I try to go back to my normal, everyday life where I’m waiting for my date. He should be here any minute, and hopefully, I’ll make a good enough first impression that he’ll want to go for a second date. Maybe we’ll get ice cream after this, and he’ll invite me back to his apartment where we’ll—
“At least call the cops!” the man screams.
I suppose that’s a very normal thing to do.
Pulling out my phone, I dial 911.
“911, please state your emergency.”
“Hi, I’m at West State Park, and there’s a man trying not to be eaten by a chimera,” I say.
“Oh! We’ll have someone out there quickly. Please remain calm and try to find a safe place to hide. Do you have a weapon on you?” she asks, panic rising in her voice.
“No, of course not,” I say.
“Can you make it to your vehicle?”
The man lets out a scream as I see that the creature is busy pushing a trash can over to the building so it can climb up to better leap onto the roof. For being merely a level one, it’s smart, I’ll give it that.
“For fuck’s sake,” I say before stuffing my phone in my pocket. I see a little plastic shovel some kid left lying on the ground near a hole and snap it, creating a sharp edge. It’s not the best and will likely break with any real impact, telling me that any strike I make will have to be into the fleshy part; can’t hit bone or I’ll be in a bit of a pinch.
The creature is fixated on the man screaming on the roof, which seems to make the monster all the more eager to eat him. So as I slide up behind the monster rearing up on the side of the restroom, it doesn’t even notice me until I’ve slammed the plastic shovel into the side of its throat.
It doesn’t let out a noise—these things would never give away that they’re in pain—instead, it shoves off the building, using all of its weight to slam into me. I’m pushed back but I remain firmly on my feet as the bleeding creature sizes me up.
The teeth it displays are thin, almost like needles, yellow eyes watching me closely as it stalks toward me while I flip the grip on my shitty little shovel so I can stab better with the widest range of movement. I can see the muscles in the creature’s body tense, telling me it’s about to spring. I steady myself as it lunges at me, sidestepping the attack, and drive the shovel in again, the stab hitting true this time. It convulses once before falling to my feet in a heap on the ground.
“You were just going to sit there while that thing ate me, and you knew how to fight it?” the guy on the roof asks.
“That doesn’t sound like a very good thank you,” I say as I scowl at him.
“What the hell should I thank you for?” he asks. “I literally had to scream for you to help!”
I throw the flimsy plastic shovel as hard as I can and it smacks into the man’s forehead, knocking him off balance before he teeters and falls off the rear end of the bathroom roof.
For a long moment, I stand there realizing that maybe… just maybe I shouldn’t have attempted to murder the man.
“You dick!” he yells from somewhere behind the building, so I decide that I really, really should make sure he’s okay.
I come around the corner where the guy is wallowing around on the ground and loom over him. He doesn’t look as cocky now, so… I mean, maybe I did a good deed. No one should be that rude… and it’s not like it was that far of a fall into the grass.
“I really think you should say, ‘Thank you, kind sir, for taking time out of your busy fucking evening to save my life.’ M’kay?”
He just continues to stare at me in horror, so I cup my hand over my ear so I can hear it better. His mouth opens and closes for a moment before I hear the most beautiful “Thank you” I’ve ever heard. It’s so heartfelt it almost brings a tear to my eye.
“You’re quite welcome. I’m happy to have helped,” I say as I head back in the direction I came from. Just as I reach the park bench where I’d been waiting, I hear a “Declan?”
Quickly, I turn around to face my date, the man I’d been talking to on a dating app for weeks before we could finally get our schedules to line up. The one who’d stood out to me most. As I turn, I realize he’s even cuter in person and obviously took great care in getting ready for tonight.
The smile when he’d first called my name plummets to something quite different as his eyes slowly draw down my body. “Oh my god,” he breathes. Not like a good “Oh my god, you’re so hot I want to push you down and screw you in the bushes” but more like an “Oh my god, hell has opened up” kind of way.
I glance down at my light gray button-down splattered with blood. I can kind of feel some of it drying on my face which I try to nonchalantly rub off as I go, “It’s okay! It’s not mine!”
For some peculiar reason, his eyes get wider. “Oh my god,” he says, and with a gag he covers his mouth.
“Is that worse?” I ask in confusion. I would assume that he’d be pleased to see that it wasn’t my own blood I was wearing but rather something else’s.
He takes a step back while looking like he’s going to throw up.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you don’t want to go out to dinner anymore?”
The stupidly cute guy shakes his head as he slowly backs away, like he thinks by creeping backwards I won’t notice the growing distance between us. But what really gets him going is the sound of sirens.
“Oh my god,” he repeats again before taking off running like he thinks I just got him dragged onto a crime scene. So of course as my date runs off, my new date with the cops arrives right on time to annoy me some more.
The first person out of the vehicle is a woman named Officer Riley who takes one look at me and scoffs. “You.”
“I’m actually on a date, so if you’ll excuse me…”
“No.”
“And if the guy over yonder tells you I pushed him off the roof of the bathroom, you tell him that I know where he lives and he better sleep with both eyes open. I don’t, actually, but I feel like it’ll work,” I say as I give her a bloody pat on the shoulder and head for my car.
“Declan, you are not leaving here without giving me a report about what happened again.”
This is why I hate dealing with them. If I stand here and give them a full report, I won’t be gone before the hunters who are actually in charge of dealing with chimera-related threats show up. And they are the absolute last people I want to talk to today. “Condensed version: I did your job for you is what happened. Send me a check in the mail,” I say.
“Cute. I want a full statement.”
“Yeah, and I wanted to get laid. Looks like neither of us are getting what we want tonight.”
“You are dreadful to deal with,” Riley says before she looks around and finds the most timid-looking of her lot. “Get a statement from Declan.”
The woman hurries after me with fear in her eyes. “H-Hi. My name is Officer Smith and—”
“Monster eat guy. I murder monster. The end,” I say as I pull open my car door, look at my clothes then start pulling my shirt off.
“Um… w-what are you doing?” she asks.
“I can’t get into my car with bloody clothes, now can I?” I ask as I fold my shirt up and toss it in the trunk.
“What time did you enter the park?”
“Today.” The moment I start to unbutton my pants, the poor woman’s face lights on fire and she clears her throat.
“Um. Do you… where was… the chimera?”
I whip my pants down and toss them in the trunk before turning to her. “In the park.”
“G-Got it,” she says as she jots a few notes down and hurries off on her way.
Wearing just my underwear, I get into the driver’s seat and head for home, wondering why the hell my normal day in my new normal life can never just be normal.
CHAPTER TWO
DECLAN
As I walk into the school, I’m almost immediately stopped by the principal, a grouchy old woman who glowers the moment she sees me yet secretly loves me.
“Tattoos,” she growls.
I sigh but unroll my shirt sleeves so they cover up the tattoos. Honestly, I can’t bitch too much. She was the only person in a two-hundred-mile radius willing to give me a job with children. It’s not that I wasn’t licensed for it. I had my shiny new degree and all the right skills, I just didn’t quite have the background for it. Or maybe it looks like I’m better suited to bashing skulls than teaching the youth.
As I slip past the principal, telling me that I passed her Medusa stare, I run into Emma, a woman who teaches first grade. “Hey, how was your date?” she asks with a huge smile. She’s a petite woman, looking even more petite as I tower over her at six four.
“He ran,” I say.
She hesitates. “Like physically bolted?”
“He took one look at me, gagged, nearly threw up, and then ran.”
“That the first time you nearly make a date throw up?” Emma asks with a grin.
“Second, actually,” I say.
She starts laughing as she bumps her shoulder into mine. I’ve known Emma since starting teaching at this school last spring. She’s probably a year or two younger than my thirty-five, if I had to guess. She was one of the first teachers to accept me, and I quickly realized that she not only accepted me, she wanted in my pants. She now knows that she’s missing a vital piece, aka a dick, to get in my pants, but I’m still quite fond of her. She doesn’t know about my past, which is nice. She had questioned a time or two how I got hired, but I’m being good. I’m normal. Very normal.
“Well… I hope the next date goes even better.”
“It won’t. He reported me, so I was banned from the app. I will live a sad and lonely life, just the way I like it. I’ll grow old with no one around me and eventually die alone where no one will find me, and my corpse will remain until someone stumbles on my body weeks later.”
“That’s quite… extreme. I can always marry you if you need me to,” she teases.
“Wow, we could live a sad and lonely life together, how much fun. You will grow old and bitter, and I’ll be left trying to hide my past from you until you snoop around and find the skeletons in my closet, so I’ll be forced to off you to keep you quiet,” I say.
Emma laughs, thinking this is the biggest joke I’ve ever told. I smile as I stop at my room. “How would you do it?” she asks.
“What part?”
“Off me.”
“Smother you under puppies since I know you prefer kittens.”
“Ah, how sweet of you.”
“That’s me, sweet,” I say as I head into my classroom as she heads to hers. We’re nearly to summer break with only a couple of days left of school, which means the days are mostly filled with end-of-the-year activities with the children.
I have fifteen minutes to prepare for their arrival, so I set to work until the first few come staggering in, excited to see me while still managing to look half asleep.
“Mr. Declan, look what I can do!” Lena says as she does something that I think was supposed to be a cartwheel. Honestly, it was dreadful and a waste of precious seconds of my life. “My mom said I’m gonna be a star gymnast!”
“I think you might need to look into other career choices,” I say as I direct her to her seat.
She just laughs as she heads off because she loves me. They all do for some odd reason. And I suppose I might care quite a bit about them back.
“I can do it better!” Donny says as he goes to try but I give him a pointed look.
“No more… whatever those are. You’re going to knock your teeth out trying. Head to your seats.”
“I lost my tooth, and the tooth fairy came and gave me a hundred dollars,” Gabe says.
“Tell your tooth fairy to stop by my house. I got ripped off,” I say.
“I only got a quarter!” one of the girls cries.
“The tooth fairy loves me more,” Gabe decides.
After I’ve finished clarifying that the tooth fairy doesn’t love Gabe more than everyone else and taking attendance, I pick up the book we’re reading and the project they’re going to make for today. “Today we’re going to read a book about careers and make this cutout showing what career—”
“Oh my god.”
I turn to face the person staring into my classroom and immediately scowl.
The man looks positively delighted and I feel like I’d positively love to never see him again. “They told me you became a teacher, but I really didn’t think it was true. Dear god, that’s hilarious and weirdly adorable.”
I walk over to the door and smile at the man before simply shutting the door in his face. “Anyway—”
Fifteen hands immediately go up. The sixteenth person decides he doesn’t need his hand to blurt out, “Who was that?”
“A nobody,” I say.
The door opens and the man steps into the room this time. “Declan, I need a word.”
“How did you get in here, Patrick?” I ask.
He flashes me his badge and his smile, both of which are quite irritating.
I lean in because last I checked Patrick didn’t have a badge and sure enough, it’s his wife’s. “You stole your wife’s badge?”
“Mr. Declan is under arrest!” one of the children shouts. And suddenly there’s mass pandemonium.
“No! I love Mr. Declan!” one child cries.
“You can’t take him!” another says.
Somehow, I’ve gained myself a mini army.
“I am not getting arrested. Patrick, leave. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I’ve literally tried hunting you down for days.”
