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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

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Karma by R.J. Blain

Okay, terms to know can be found here.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

As with Pack Justice, I’m gonna do a bunch of spoilers by telling you the story in order of in-universe chronology instead of the books method of presenting it for the sake of suspense. Got it? Good.

So Karma Clarice Johnson isn’t nearly as human as we are led to believe at the beginning, you see – Karma was adopted after being dropped off in a forest with only a gold locket with her first name inscribed on it. She was taken in by her parents, whose names are so unimportant I’ll just call them Shitter Dad and Shitter Mom, as an adopted surrogate for their missing son as opposed to being one of the many fostered children the two have cared for over the years. Now, Shitter Mom and Shitter Dad are not what I would call good people, mostly because they (mostly Shitter Mom) beat the shit out of Karma when she was a small child. The Inquisition allowed them to adopt Karma because they had a great track record with taking care of children of supernaturals – they just never realized that they were so good because the children were too terrified to get into trouble.

Karma in particular was beaten regularly until she was five, because she is a… something? We never actually find out what she is, but she has aspects of both shifters and earth witches. Karma has two modes: normal person mode (a result of her abuse) and vixen mode, which means that she doesn’t think like a person, she thinks like an actual fox – biting, scratching, and making fox noises instead of talking. The process of breaking her lack of control and overpowering instincts have left her with several phobias, heights in particular. She also has an issue with water, like many powerful earth witches, she sinks like a stone; water loves her and doesn’t want to let her go – ever. But because character’s have to have sudden realizations of the supernatural, Karma’s early abuse has cause her to severely repress all memory of her fox powers, relegating them purely to dreams and a childhood fixation.

Remember how I said that the Shitter parents had a missing son? Yeah, so when Karma was six years old, the team of FBI agents assigned to the case by CARD (Child Abduction Rapid Deployment division) came to visit so say that they had found the boys body; it was the four grown men breaking down and crying over their failure to save an infant that stuck with her and gave her her life-long dream: to join CARD and save parents from that kind of heartache. So now, at the age of 29 (six years after entering FBI training), Karma has been accepted for a position at CARD in New York, and she is finishing the move out procedures after selling her house in Baltimore.

So it turns out that her house is being bought by some condescending dick-bags, who tell her that it’s not right for her parents to make a young girl like her do all this paperwork – oh yeah, did I mention that despite being 29 Karma looks like she’s 18 at most? Because she does and that’s important. Just to be sure we’re ready for the story begins let’s get her appearance out of the way, yeah? Karma is short, at around five-foot-one, she is also hot – and I mean hot. While her actual features are never mentioned, she has pale skin (in a pretty way? Idk) with eyes the color of amber (not brown, like vividly orange/amber). Her also needs to be regularly dyed to appear normal, because while her long locks are a deep black in color, the last few inches are a stark white, and when put in pony tail looks like a fox tail. Got all that? Because people are gonna say shit about it and it will be important (okay it’s mostly her eyes but whatever).

So Karma hands of the last of the house keys to the buyers, and tries not to use her 23 years of kickboxing experience to earn herself an assault charge, opting to go to a music festival downtown to cool off before competing in a womens kickboxing tournament later that evening. Tomorrow she drives up to New York City for her dream job. Things are looking really great for Karma. For about five fucking seconds.

At the festival Karma hops in line to satisfy her funnel cake addiction, and ends up behind a middle aged woman and her seven children. The oldest child, a girl named Chloe, sees the kickboxing patches that Karma had sewn on her purse and starts chatting her up about the sport. Karma goes on the whole “everybody loves a whooping” spiel and admirably advocates the sport (she’s a four-time champion btw). This continues until the other kids (ages 3-6) decide to start screaming and being little shits; Karma offers to hold the youngest child, an infant named Annabelle, while Chloe and her mother rein the rowdy kids in. While Karma is holding Annabelle, however, she feels something eerily similar to a gun barrel pressed up against her head. No… yeah that’s a gun barrel. Everyone starts screaming and backing away, while the man with the gun pulls a Karma and the baby into a black SUV, then goes screaming off down the street.

The kidnappers are smart; they use multiple identical SUVs to separate law enforcement and turn a chase into a mess of hide-and-go-fuck-yourself. They think that Karma is just some teenage girl, and force her to take care of Annabelle in exchange for not killer her. The soon cross into West Virginia, and time starts getting skewed as Karma rests and focuses on fooling the kidnappers and caring for the baby. Somewhere in Kentucky they make her drive for a spell, then they must have slipped her some sedatives somewhere along the line, because before she knows it, she’s in a lodge in the mountains somewhere in Colorado. The abductors remove all ways of telling the time other than the lengths of their shifts on watch. Days pass, and finally, a call comes in: in twenty-four hours, dump the baby and kill the girl.

The abductors don’t realize that Karma knows what’s going on, and one of them lets his guard down; she kicks him in the back of the skull, knocks him out, steals his gun, then uses his phone to call the cops before fleeing with Annabelle in a travel carrier. She treks through the woods for several days, before she realizes a wolf is stalking her. When she puts Annabelle down to give her a change, she turns around to find herself nose to nose with the beast. She screams and pistol whips it. It smiles at her. She pistol whips it again. It is a very friendly wolf, it’s also way bigger than a wolf has any right to be.

Realizing that the wolf probably won’t eat her, she sets off with the wolf in tow, and she finally finds a river so she can mix more formula for the baby (desperate times because river water might make you sick boys and girls). She tests the water on herself first, but when she turns around and sees someone is standing at the baby carrier, she panics and slips and falls in the water. Remember: Karma can’t fucking swim. So she starts doing a strip tease because trying to doggy paddle in heavy wet clothes doesn’t really work very well, but she’s yanked out of the water when she’s down to her panties by none other than her former partner, Jake.

A slight digression here for Jake, because he’s the love interest and it’s important. In the six years Karma has worked in the FBI, she has had not one, not two, not three, but NINE partners. The first one repeatedly allowed her to get shot because he was too busy trying to impress their supervisor, the next six just couldn’t handle how strict she was about the buddy system, the eighth one actually tried to murder her before disappearing into the void. But Jake, Jake was perfect; he always watched her back, always kept it professional. They worked together for four years, and other than him being there to razz her every once in a while, they got along really well. But they chose separate paths for their careers, she wanted to join CARD (Child Abduction Rapid Deployment), and he wanted to join HRT (Hardcore Rectal Training). They said goodbye as partners and friends a few days before she was abducted, but they called him on to the case when they finally realized an agent was involved.

So they bring Karma to the hospital (she was in shock and hypothermic at this point), and goose her up with some morphine (any other sedative turns her into a screaming homicidal maniac). When she’s recovered and lucid they begin her interview and debriefing, and this is where the sexism starts. The guy they sent from Washington immediately accuses her of being in on the abduction to boost her resume, and Karma responds by not talking other than to demand a lawyer. Eventually the director in charge of the FBI in Colorado comes in and kicks the asshole out, then they start actually debriefing her. They don’t learn anything new, and Jake takes Karma out for pizza in celebration of her safe return (pepperoni, light on the cheese).

They wake the pair up extra early, hand Karma a gun, and put them on the first plane they can find back to Baltimore. They then tell her that she will have to lie low and play Anchor (basically a coms-monitoring secretary) until the media sensation from the abduction blows over. So Karma moves into her new apartment in NYC, cuts and dyes her hair, quits kickboxing so she doesn’t need to go out in public, and buys color contacts; she’s finally starting her dream job.

Too bad her team is full of sexist old-school assholes who don’t respect her and let a kid die because they didn’t want to follow a lead she discovered. Nice! This goes on for two whole months, and Karma’s life enters a stress based death-spiral. Since moving to NYC, Karma has only eaten pizza (pepperoni, light on the cheese, just the way Jake liked it), and she’s getting out of shape from being unable to go to a gym and kickbox; her job is so arbitrary that she actually sits in a pool and doggy paddles around while listening to her supposed teammates chatter on the phone. Finally, the last straw is placed on the camel’s back, her supervisor looks at her and says: “You have brown eyes, not amber. Was putting the exotic color on your file just to boost your confidence?” She very slowly takes out each of the color contacts, and tells him to go fuck himself. She quits.

After a brief standoff where she tells her supervisor that he can have his stupid boys’ club and shove it up his ass, and walks out on the job she’s worked her entire life for. So Karma decides that she needs to take a walk and finally get around to exploring the city. She winds up in central park, and after kicking stones into pond for a while, someone sits on the bench next to her. He says that her proposal of quiting has been rejected, effective immediately. Turns out that this guy (who looks maybe 30 if you’re generous) is actually her supervisor’s boss, Kelvin Daniels, and he takes Karma out for some Italian food (not pizza), and makes her and offer: sign a waiver (which basically says “don’t kill innocents” and let’s her break pretty much any other rules), go rogue, and take an unmarked car (a yellow Corvette convertible) out to due the case that her team already left for, on her own, and she has to do it without any FBI agents finding her first. If she wins, she gets put on a new team and she gets to keep the car; if she loses, she gets a new team and isn’t allowed to quit. Basically if she doesn’t agree to this game they will arrest her and keep her in custody until she agrees to take her job back. Cuz that’s not illegal at all.

She agrees, takes the Corvette, and puts on her disguise: booty shorts, a halter top with leather jacket to hid her gun, and foot-long hair extensions; she looks like a promiscuous highschooler. She heads off on her assignment.

Jacob Henry, ten year old son of an accountant that works for the government. He has been missing for a few days now, and may have run away to his relatives in a neighboring state. Karma starts by meeting with Jacob’s uncle in New York, Winston Henry, who likes to hang out at home in the buff. She learns that Jacob has a lot of issues: he hates being home-schooled (even though his parents claimed he was registered at the local school), and has few friends, and his parents don’t let him go outside, and life’s just not awesome for young Jacob. Also Jacob’s father doesn’t get along really well with the rest of the family. She also notices that someone has tampered with the phone chord in the drywall, possibly a wiretap. She then spoke with another uncle, Peter, who says a lot without giving any useful info other than a set of albums that supposedly have pictures of Jacob’s fathers friends, who drive around in nondescript black SUVs and aren’t terribly friendly.

So Karma gives Daniels a call and they manage to connect the Jacob’s case with the Gianni case (her and Annabelle’s kidnapping), and Daniels wants to take her off the case before she becomes a target, but Karma says she really will go rogue if he tries. So he says that if the agents he has pursuing her catch up then she needs to take a partner. She agrees (kind of) and looks through the album, finding a picture of one of the men who kidnapped her. She tells Daniels and heads off the next day to meet with the principal of the local elementary school to talk about any overlaps between home-schooled kids and those who have public education. Getting the names of two local hangouts, she catches sight of a nice car that’s following her. She lures the car to the more popular of the two hangouts, a gorge that cuts through the town. It turns out that the partner they sent her was actually Jake, and they roll out to their hotel room to have a chat about all the shit she’s gone through recently (they always take a double-bed room after an incident where a guy broke into Karma’s room when she was taking a shower and tried to kill her). They catch up, and then Jake gets really uncomfortable and insists that she change into normal clothes. The tiny booty shorts and halter top are a bit too stimulating for him, and asks if she’s wearing the outfit because she is switching careers to being a prostitute, because if so he has a lot of cash in his wallet and a set of handcuffs. After checking the waiver to see that it removes all rule about coworker fraternization, they whip out the handcuffs and have a whale of a time “roughing up the suspect.”

Karma is so impressed with his sexual prowess that she jokingly says “marry me.” Jake responds with a “yes! NO TAKEBACKSIES!” and they take a quick drive to Ohio and get married before anyone can talk them out of it. They head back and go to the second hangout in town: a big alcove under an overpass that is covered in detailed chalk drawings. Karma spots the signs of a a shooting here, two bullet hole and signs of removed bloodsplatter. They call Daniels to get a forensics team over and head back to the gorge to investigate if any bodies were dumped in it. After very carefully “negotiating” with Karma’s fear of heights, they look around the river running through. They don’t find anything, until Karma trips and falls right on top of a rotting corpse. They take off most of her clothes to wash of the pieces of the body stuck to her, and she trips on another corpse. She sees the third without falling on it. They call the forensic team and cops over, and then get a call that Jacob has turned up at his uncle Winston’s house, traumatized and covered in blood. They drive the Corvette at about 125 miles per hour to get there as soon as possible, before getting Jacob to agree to go to the hospital with them.

At the hospital we meet Jake’s father, who looks just like him plus a year or two. He tells them they have to go with him to D.C. and he takes Karma’s car keys without asking first. Now, Karma is not really in a good place right now, and she gets fed up with people not asking her to do something like they would a reasonable person and kicks the keys out of his hands (kickboxing ftw).

They confiscate her gun as they get on the plane (saying that they did not have her paperwork to bring it on the plane ready on such short notice), but then they tell her once they land that they won’t return her gun until she passes a psych evaluation. They thought she wouldn’t submit her weapon willingly, they didn’t trust her enough to be so reasonable, Jake didn’t trust her to be so reasonable. Agents can’t deploy without a weapon, she’ll be forced to Anchor for months before they get around to doing her eval and requalification with a firearm. That fucking tears it. She has a nice dinner with Jake, his father, and his mother; she tells them that she will be sending in her resignation immediately.

The next morning she has a talk with Jake’s mother, borrows her car, and heads to the airport. She walks up to the ticket counter and buys the first airline ticket that catches her eye: first class to Morocco.

She explores the country for a week, buys new clothes, a bag, and a set of beads the same chocolate brown of Jake’s eyes (the traitorous bastard). After that she heads to Russia, sees that it sucks, and immediately hops on a plane to Germany. She grabs a really expensive rental car, and drives around the autobahn for two weeks straight, no phone, no credit cards, only cash and the road. Finally she decides to head to London, then she’ll go home to sort out what she’ll do with her life.

In London she gets stopped by a man with the FBI named Agent Miller, he insists on bringer her to the American Embassy, and by insists I mean that her resignation was rejected on the grounds that it was “done under duress” and that as an agent who did not respond to muster he has full legal right to arrest her as a “possible traitor” to the United States government. She agrees to go. On her arrival at the embassy, she is brought into a room and left sitting with a psychiatrist and psychologist names Dr. Sampson, who has been assigned to do her psych eval and then either give her treatment or return her to active duty. Karma tells her to fuck off. Dr. Sampson implies she’s a whore that willfully endangers others like a petulant child crying over a gun. Karma responds by calmly denying such allegations, punctuates her statement by slamming her hand on the table so hard that she fractures her fingers and dislocates her wrist.

They take a trip to the hospital and get her some really nice morphine (turns out the use of other anesthetics was expressly forbidden in her file, the entry is highlighted, underlined, and circled). They bring Karma, now a sobbing mess because drugs, and hand her off to Jake, who just about kills someone when she starts crying into his shirt. Jake brings her into their hotel (which is actually a five-star hotel converted from an old castle), and takes her to their room. They spend the evening… making up for lost time… and the next morning she answers a knock on the door to find… the Shitter parents. Shitter mom barges in spitting hellfire, but Karma manages to focus her parents’ wrath onto Jake, and hides under the bed while they’re distracted. Jake’s parents kick the door down in the middle of Shitter mom’s tongue-lashing, and start their own lecture on how it’s bad form to get married in Ohio at 8 a.m. without inviting your parents you little shit.

Eventually everyone realizes that Karma is nowhere to be found, and Shitter mom says that she’ll have climbed a tree or something and they all go off to find her. Jake pulls her out from under the bed and they sneak out to London to buy some new clothes (Jake had one suit and Karma had two outfits that hadn’t been washed in three weeks). As they walk, they hear screeching, and a bullet blasts through Karma’s shoulder, and three shots hit Jake’s chest. Karma starts going into shock as she’s pulled into a nondescript black SUV again.

She passes out as they drive her away, only to be slapped awake somewhere in the woods. Her kidnapper punches her in the shoulder and asks how she knew that Annabelle would be kidnapped at the festival. Karma goes quiet, she stares at them like they are already dead. What’s the point? She thinks, Jake is dead. But she’ll take his killers with her. She opens her mouth, and what comes out is a fox’s scream. She shifts and tears out the man’s throat, all human thoughts and memories a forgotten dream to her bestial instincts. The killing begins. More kidnappers come to check in with the one’s that grabbed her, she kills them all, and when they are all dead she tears the whole place apart.

Her business finished, she heads off into the forest. She slinks into the river, the water welcomes her, the earth hides her scent. Wolves are following her; she can smell them invading her new territory. The pack come to the river where she lurks, invisible in the water. A foolish wolf begins to drink from the waters, his lack of caution infuriates her, and she jumps out of the water and bites him right on the nose. The pack startles, but soon surrounds her, she keeps biting the wolf’s nose, until he shakes her off and she falls into the deeper waters. The water welcomes her and she passes out as she starts drowning.

She awakens with the wolves surrounding her, an injured male watches her anxiously. She’s terrified that they’ll eat her, and when the alpha female starts licking her it just gets worse. A woman picks her up. She brings her back to where Karma killed all of her attackers, and passes out.

She wakes up again in a bed, and Jake’s voice greets her. She demands that they’re dead, three shots to the chest is not survivable and she’s not buying what he’s selling. Finally he gets her to accept that they’re alive, but then she sees that his wounds are almost healed, it’s been four days. Bulletholes don’t heal that fast. But they did. Her shoulder is in a sling, and the x-rays show that the bone is perfectly healed, a year of healing finished in days. Impossible, she says, but the evidence is before her, and the only problem with her shoulder is that the tissue hasn’t healed over fully.

They tell her that her surgeon was Dr. Sampson’s father, Mr. Dr. Sampson, and he made the unfortunate choice of trying a bunch of different painkillers on her so she wouldn’t get addicted to morphine; she told her parents off on the phone and explained the entirety of her sex life with Jake in front of Jake and his parents and admitted that Shitter mom “beats the sin” out of kids in front of two members of CARD and an HR manager from the FBI. So guess who isn’t going to be allowed to foster kids, and disowns Karma?

So after being taken out to a firing range to give her mostly healed shoulder some exercise, Karma has a nice cry out in the woods about how her parents hate her now, and then one of the giant wolves comes out of the shadows. Karma screams like a fox and climbs a tree. Jake tries to convince her that she’s safe and Karma screams that she’ll miss him once the wolf eats him. Finally Jake reveals that the wolf is actually his mom, and then his dad shows up and busts as over how much of a fragile baby she is being despite the fact she can turn into a coyote-sized fox.

Eventually they get her to accept the crazy that is the situation, and then bustle her off back to America so they can begin hunting the remaining abductors, they have a license to kill and the Inquisition as told them that there are no rules as long as their foes are taken down quietly. The End.

#rjblain #book summary #witch and wolf #karma

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

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Pack Justice by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, terms to know can be found here.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

I’m gonna level with you here, for the sake of telling the story as clearly as possible, I’m gonna tell it in the order stuff happens in the world of the book instead of the order the book presents it in. Clear? Good.

Prosecuting Attorney Sean Scott discovered he had a cheetah spirit when he was five or six years old, and he has no idea that he is not alone in the world of supernaturals. Sean doesn’t know about the Inquisition, Fenerec, witches, nor shamans; he just thinks that he’s the weird one. His cheetah, who has no name and shall be referred to as “Statler” from now on, takes the form a ghost only he can see and interact with. Statler also endowed him with the ability to temporarily take his form, and they can swap bodily control and communicate purely with thought. This has become a sticking point for Sean by the time the story starts for two reasons: one, Statler hates Sean’s abusive wife, Idette, and two, Statler wants Sean to get nasty with Defense Attorney Andrea Morgan with an urgency that has escalated for the past ten years.

We should digress here to discuss Idette. Sean and Idette have been married for a very long time, straight out of college to be precise. Their marriage was good, Idette was gentle and kind, and was pretty much the stereotype of a 50s housewife. However, seven or eight years ago, when Sean was just turning thirty, things changed; Idette became a rogue Fenerec. Sean of course had no idea, but he is certainly familiar with the repercussions. People who become a Fenerec after they are married will immediate assume their spouse as their mate, but for Sean and Idette that was not going to happen. You see, a few years before Idette’s turning Sean met Andrea Morgan, and Andrea Morgan is also a Fenerec. Andrea wanted to take Sean as a mate, and Statler accepted the mating bond in Sean’s stead, without telling Sean. So we come to the current situation: Sean and Andrea are mates, and Sean’s wife is dominated by the need to take him as her mate, and Fenerec don’t give up on mates; they also are disturbingly territorial and violent when they’re needs go unmet. So Idette tries to fix this the only way she knows how: by trying to force her mating bond onto Sean. Her attempts take the form of physical abuse – by biting him in particular, biting him until she draws blood and scars him. Sean doesn’t know why this is happening, Idette doesn’t know why this is happening (though her wolf instincts are slowly driving her insane), and Andrea is stuck pining because she doesn’t realize what’s going on either. Now hang on you say, how come no one realizes Sean’s wife is a Fenerec? Shouldn’t other Fenerec be able to smell her or some shit? Technically yes, except that Sean has a bunch of friends in the police department who are also Fenerec, so he smells like wolves all the damn time: Idette thinks it’s her scent and the others think it’s theirs. Good going guys.

And so we come finally to the beginning of the story: settling a big case in the courtroom. The players of this scene are Sean (as lead prosecutor), Andrea (as the defense), Judge O’Mallory (local alpha Fenerec), and the Defendant: Douglass Roberts, accused of raping multiple women and the murder of a police officer. After a nation-wide television coverage of the case, Roberts is declared guilty. Much good news, very celebration. Wow. Except for one thing: someone submitted an envelope to the police during the trial. The envelope contains pictures showing that Roberts had an accomplice, and they’ve been stalking Sean. Sean is worried about a danger to his person, and asks if he should cancel the trip he’s planned. The trip is a short vacation with Idette out to an isolated cabin in the woods of New York (they live in L.A. btw) to give their marriage one last chance before he served the divorce paper’s after years of browbeating from Judge O’Mallory to submit them. As much as Sean wants to cancel, O’Mallory says that he should go – to throw the stalker off his trail.

After Sean’s cop friends (who are also Fenerec) get him drunk so he can’t go home immediately, Sean flops into bed and avoids Idette as much as possible. The next day they head out to New York and arrive at the lodge Sean’s rented. Idette is very hostile to Sean and calls him out for the smallest errors, but she loves the choice of venue and asks if he’ll take a walk with her in the woods after dark. Because that’s not the start of ANY horror movies at all. He agrees, of course, and they kayak to the other side of the lake to walk through the pristine woods in the light of the full moon. As they hike through the forest, Sean loses track of Idette, and he notices with Statler’s senses that a wolf has begun to stalk him.

This is no ordinary wolf, but a Fenerec that Statler identifies as Idette, who is also the size of a pony. Nice. So Idette attacks Sean; he defends himself by bicycle kicking her right in the face; she responds by ripping his throat out. Sean passes out.

He awakens to Statler whining and trying to staunch the bleeding with his paw, but it’s no use. That’s when the wolf spirit appears. This is the first time the Fenerec’s wolf spirit is seen in any of the books, and it’s appearance is that of a spectral wolf with silver eyes and fur the colors of the night sky and glistening with stars. It approaches him, and offers to become one with him like Statler had, he accepts.

He awakens as a wolf pup, dazed and hurting. His throat has regenerated but it has left him weak, and Idette lurks nearby. She grabs him, and brings him back to their kayaks, she transforms back and brings him to the cabin. She cleans off the blood and lies a silk band around his muzzle, “Everything’ll be okay now,” she says “I’ll take good care of you now. You don’t have to worry about anything anymore. No one will ever separate us now, not as long as I live”(location 746-747, yay ebooks).

She abducts him in his wolf form, they leave everything behind except the rental car and Idette’s luggage. She keeps him as a pet for an unknown amount of time, and she fashions a collar and muzzle for him out of leather with silver super-glued to the outside. We don’t know how long they keep up this pattern, since human concepts of time lose meaning the longer one stays a wolf, but one day Idette slips up, and Sean tears his leash and escapes. He happily risks the burns to take off the silvered muzzle and collar, and he runs off into the wilderness.

Sean isn’t stupid, he realizes that they left a huge amount of his blood and signs of struggle in the woods of New York, he knows that they left his torn clothes and personal effects; as far as he can tell, everyone will believe that Sean Scott is dead. He lets Statler and the wolf (we’ll call him Waldorf) take control of their body, they don’t know how to become human again but they do know how to become a cheetah and become a wolf respectively. The two animal spirits switch off between them as Sean’s spirit drifts and sleeps, they debate over which kind of beast is the better hunter, and they test their arguments as they travel to find prey. More time passes, and the weather gets colder, Sean and the beasts decide to stay in their wolf form to stay warm, and they pick up on the scent of blood. They follow the scent, thinking that a deer may have fallen and become injured – easy prey for a nearly full grown Fenerec. But their prey isn’t a deer; deer do not sob. Deer don’t cry and whine and raise a din when predators are near. The three find themselves looking at a teenage girl, using a box cutter to slit her wrists and bleed out.

Waldorf balks at the girl, it goes against everything he stands for to see a pup so abused that is would kill itself; Statler is just as angry. The two beasts wake Sean’s spirit to ask his opinion, and give him control again. Sean had helped prosecute abusers many times, and had a good reputation for comforting the victims – his beasts want him to take the lead; he agrees. He sneaks up on her and scares so badly she drops the knife. He grabs it and buries it, before approaching her like a friendly stray mutt. Waldorf is not amused, but he rolls with it. The girl (her name is Kimberly) takes one look at the giant cheetah-spotted dog that won’t let her kill herself and just breaks down crying. She just sobs and sobs into his fur, and when she finishes crying she leads him to her home. They pass through a field of corn, abandoned and rotting. Kimberly brings her into her house, we find that her parents have died recently and that her uncle got everything – Kimberly included. The scents of the house nearly send Sean and his beasts on the warpath; the whole building reeks of her fear and a man’s arousal. Her uncle is not a good man.

Kimberly, now armed with a kind canine companion, finally builds up the courage to run away. She steals her uncle’s car, which he bought by selling all her parent’s farming equipment (shits a cherry red classic muscle car). They head cross-country, all the way to L.A. (there a back again, a wolf-cheetah-man’s journey), where they dress Sean (she named him Spots) as a service dog.

Stepping back for a moment, let’s look at what’s been going on for the Fenerec pack in L.A. and Andrea. It has been over a month since Sean and Idette disappeared, and shit’s gone pretty sideways for the pack; Andrea’s losing her goddamn mind with her mate probably dead but unable to abandon her responsibilities to go search the scene herself, the policemen in the pack are not much better off, but the alpha pair – Police chief Ramirez and her mate, Judge O’Mallory – keep everyone in line while they wait for the Inquisition to give them answers. Now imagine you are one of those Fenerec police officers on your regular patrol. You see a girl, she’s young, gaunt, and pale – by your experience a runaway – and then you see her dog. You just about trip over yourself watching a Fenerec you’ve never seen before pretending to be a docile service dog. You draw closer, trying to catch the strange wolf’s scent and identify them. You get the scent – it’s familiar – but whose scent is it? OH FUCK! You just about shit your pants. It’s Sean! Sean’s back! And a wolf! And acting like a service dog for a runaway?!

Sean and Kimberly catch sight of some policemen coming towards them. Sean thinks he should know them, but he’s purposefully caged his human memories to keep himself together. They start asking questions about him – well, about Spots anyways. Kimberly gets nervous, but the cops are really friendly and nice and they just want to bring her to the station and feed her dog (lol) and make sure all of her service animal paperwork are in order. That’s when Sean pulls the leash out of her hand and jumps in the back of their police cruiser. I guess he trusted them to help her out.

So they separate Spots (Sean) and Kimberly at the station, and they bring their cheetah-spotted buddy up to the captain’s office. Sean is pretty confused at this point, they shouldn’t be able to recognize him… right? That’s when Alice shows up, she’s another police officer who takes a surprising shine to the giant dog that just walked in. They bring to Captain Ramirez’s door; on the other side of it they hear crashing and shouting on the other side. The officers all sigh, Andrea’s back to drinking it seems. They enter, and Ramirez takes one sniff of Sean and blows her top. “Are you kidding me?!” she shouts, as Sean relegates himself to the farthest corner he can find. Ramirez cajoles Andrea out of her drunken stupor, and demands she take a whiff of this new wolf in their midst.

Andrea just about shits herself when she catches his scent, and she immediately glomps onto Sean, an blubbering mess. Once Andrea is done ugly-crying all over Sean, they bring him out to the alpha pair’s cabin in the woods outside the city to get him back in human shape. They also put Kimberly in the foster care of a Fenerec couple, because nothing says safe like hyper-protective wolf monsters.

Sean passes out while shifting back, and as soon as he’s awake he starts going through the delightful right of passage all Fenerec face when they become human again after their first shift: ritual sickness. So Sean spends the next who knows how long vomiting everywhere, and when he can finally stand without shitting himself he starts eating everything in sight, and he meets his guards for the night. The two cops that picked him and Kimberly up have been assigned to him so he doesn’t run off, and they explain some important info about being a Fenerec, and let slip that him and Andrea are mates before sending him off to bed again. He awakens at two the next morning, absolutely famished and in need of a run. So he turns into a cheetah and jumps out the window. Genius.

Now, let’s be clear: at this point nobody knows that he can turn into a cheetah, nobody has seen him do it and he’s never told anyone. But regardless he goes hunting in cheetah form and by the time he’s done he’s not thinking people thoughts, he’s thinking cheetah and wolf thoughts. Statler and Waldorf convince Sean that as long as Idette is alive and out there Andrea’s relationship with him will be at risk, therefor the only course of action is to chase the bitch down and kill her. They bound off into the night. They track down Idette in some mountains (somewhere in Montana I think?) and it seems she’s made some friends. Sean nearly vomits at the stench of madness (apparently mad wolves have a smell). Idette’s giant wolf is surrounded by newly turned Fenerec pups, and before her stands… dun-dun-duuuuuuuuuun… Douglas Roberts! The bitch busted him out of jail! Waldorf tells Sean that she’s about to perform the ritual on him, they can’t allow a monster like Roberts to get wolf powers; it would be a disaster. So he leaps down from his hiding place and mauls the shit out of Roberts, killing him. Then he goes for Idette, ignoring the useless and unsteady pups. But Idette’s a giant wolf and he’s only the size of a normal cheetah (~3 ft. at the shoulder), she takes a few hits before snapping his leg like a twig. Then she kidnaps him again.

Sean emergency shifts into his wolf form to speed his healing, but before he can try to escape another Fenerec appears: a black and white female. The new she-wolf kicks the shit out of Idette, and forces her to escape before circling back to stay with Sean. The two find a place to den while Sean’s leg heals, but soon the she-wolf leaves him alone and doesn’t return. Sean hears the singing of an entire wolf pack in the distance, and shifts to his cheetah form and hides up a tree. To be clear, none of the good guys realize Sean can become a cheetah still, so they think they’ve lost a three hundred pound wolf monster and there’s no way he made it up a tree. An entire pack of wolves approach his hiding place, and Sean sees that there is a male wolf that keeps trying to get frisky with the white and black she-wolf. He keeps rubbing up against her and nipping her and she rejects him every time but he won’t stop, and none of the others are stopping him either. This for some reason infuriates Sean, and he power bombs the shit out of this trespassing wolf, then kicks the shit out of him. Of course, none of the pack was expecting a cheetah to jump out of a tree and attack one of them, but they realize that the cheetah has Sean’s scent and decide that they’ve seen stranger things, and just let him defend his woman (in case you haven’t guessed it the she-wolf is Andrea). He puts on a big show of purring and rubbing all over his freshly won mate, before someone comes up behinds him and stabs with a needle full of morphine.

He wakes up again at the cabin, in bed and very naked. He notices that there are arms around him; Andrea is in bed with him, also very naked. Andrea wakes up from his moving about and they have a grand old time doing the horizontal mambo. Sadly, the cops show up and tell them that they have to go to work, well, Andrea has to go to work and Sean needs to turn into a wolf so they don’t have to explain why a man who they claimed was recovering in a private hospital in New York was doing in LA. They bring him to the police station to send him through K9 unit training, which includes scaring the shit out of him repeatedly to test his control – apparently the Inquisition doesn’t like it when a freshly minted wolf loses his shit because some kid set off some firecrackers and attacks someone. Once they are satisfied he won’t lose it completely they send him out on some drug busts, I guess to ensure he could use his new olfactory senses effectively? Whatever. So they bring him to a warehouse and send him out, problem is they didn’t clear the area very well, and Sean is forced to take down some guys, one of whom shoots Sean in the shoulder.

So they bring him back to the station and Captain Ramirez crucifies them for letting Sean get hurt like that, especially because Andrea felt Sean get hurt through their bond and flipped her top. So they realize that getting shot did not turn Sean into a panicky killer then returning to work in the courtroom probably won’t do it either, so they facilitate his “fateful return” to the city in human form. They also tell him that since all the wolves Idette made were criminals she busted out of jail after Sean put him in there, by California law he was allowed to divorce her Scott-free and got everything in the settlement. But Sean does not want to keep his house, seeing as it was the place Idette abused him for nearly a decade, so he calls a previous client who happens to be a real-estate agent and they go to look at houses together. Except, Sean never told anyone that he was doing this, and everyone thought he was at home all day; this was problematic when someone blew up his house.

So while Sean gets attacked by a piece of falling ceiling, people are holding Andrea back from digging through the debris in hopes of finding him. Sean and his realtor show up as the cops set up the barricade around the property; everyone is fucking pissed when they see him, and they quickly escort him into police custody while they search for evidence. Once they are done looking through the wreckage they check him in to an Inquisition-protected hotel, and he’s happy to realize that he won’t be lonely because the hotel suite came with a pretty lady-wolf wearing nothing but a smile. Sadly they can’t just hole-up in the hotel room and fuck forever, so they send Andrea home and decide to have Sean “date some pretty girls” and by that I mean meet with some local witches so he can have help controlling his wolf side.

This plan works for about five fucking seconds before Andrea shows up looking fine as hell, and everyone realizes that this was a stupid plan so they decide to just move on with their lives and let Sean and Andrea move in with each other and maybe adopt Kimberly, because Idette is going to come after them sooner or later so they might as well just set up as many defenses as possible in the meantime. The End

#rjblain #witch and wolf #Pack Justice #book summary

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

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Beneath a Blood Moon by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, terms to know can be found here.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

WARNING: THIS FOLLOWING CONTENTS INCLUDE RAPE, PHYSICAL ABUSE, SUICIDE, AND MURDER.

Sara Madison is a stripper living in Las Vegas, at twenty-one, she has been working under a fake ID for the past three or four years, ever since she escaped her rich, controlling, and abusive father. Since Sara has no proper credentials she’s confident her father can’t track, she’s been working four gigs and paying for college one class at a time, with her current income and pace it will take her over a decade to finally get a degree and a more savory job. As the days go by she becomes more and more tempted to let go of her principles and take the extra income for going home with clients from the clubs, but despite the criticism from her coworkers she has persevered. It’s here that we begin the story.

Sara gets back at four a.m. from the club, and on her doorstep is a black funerary urn with crimson-red roses inside. Hidden among the roses is a note: These roses aren’t red, unshed blood is blue, this urn for the dead, I made just for you. One trip to vomit later and Sara is terrified, but she can’t call the police because they will just blame it on her being a slut and then ask uncomfortable questions about her less than real records, so she heads to class like nothing happened and heads to the club. It’s then that we learn her main method for getting good tips on-stage: find a client you like, dance like it’s just for them.

When she looks out at the crowd, she doesn’t see anyone that catches her fancy until – she saw him. The hottie™. He is perfect: the right height, the right amount of muscle, a rugged handsomeness that’s not too rough but not too smooth, and these inhumanly golden-amber eyes that just scream sexy (that’s “sexy” read as “totally a werewolf”). So a very good night of tips later and Sara puts on the feathers and sequins for her next gig. On her way to the gig, she meets – surprise – the amber-eyed man and a friend of his, who hope to get some souvenir pictures. Of course they get their pictures. Hot guys always get pictures. The amber-eyed man even blushed. And has a sexy voice. And a nice ass. Priorities.

Too bad that when she gets home there is an ominous empty hourglass and another note. What a fucking buzzkill, huh? So she calls her only friend and coworker, Isabella, and hustles out to her place to crash until all this blows over, but she forgot her textbooks, so the pair wait until they finish work (the amber-eyed hottie wasn’t there this time, what a shame) and stop by Sara’s apartment. Then they get knocked out from behind.

They wake up in a shack, tied up with some shitty rope. Sara chews through the stuff and frees Isabella, but because escape attempts that don’t involve ridiculously complicated plans never seem to work in fiction, their captor appears. This douchebag’s name is Rory, and he was Sara’s boyfriend until he cheated on her just before she ran away from home. So Rory comes in and is all like “love me baby” and Sara is just like “why would I love someone I could not trust to keep his dick in his pants tho?” and he’s all like “because if you don’t ima kill both of you,” and Isabella is all like “hey, hey, hey… if I fuck will you not kill me?” to which he responds “OH YEAH.” And so the two start flim flamming their jimmie jams, while Sara – bruised but not broken – crawls out into the moonlight of the Nevada desert. The moon tonight is an eerie blood red color, and as Sara drags herself through the sand – maybe she is broken, her sternum at least – Rory and Isabella show up and start mocking her, then Rory gives one last offer *cough* death threat *cough* which she refuses cuz Rory is a bitch and Sara takes no prisoners. So Rory draws a weird pattern on the ground, and asks Isabella if she is willing to be his, then gives her a good snogging, and then they turn into giant wolves. Hungry wolves. They start eating Sara alive.

But as she screams and writhes in the sand, something comes to her, an offer for help, an offer for safety. She accepts. Sara’s new wolf howls in triumph, and turns her attackers into puddles of meat paste. Sara returns to the shack, is released from her lupine shape as the moon sets, vomits everywhere, washes herself off, and nabs some sweatpants and a shirt before setting off toward the distant lights of the city.

The night blurs, and Sara finds herself on her doorstep. She spends the next several days going between three states: horribly sick, disturbing gluttony, and the kind of lust that would impress a succubus. Her wolf is rutting, and at this point any male will do (where my gay wolves at Blain? Gimme my gay wolves dammit!). But Sara’s got her heart set on keeping herself under control, and finally convinces her wolf that she will take any man the wolf wants, so long as he fits her standards. The wolf agrees. Once she can finally stand without vomiting, shitting herself, or needing a cold shower, Sara realizes that her new diet – all meat and 25,000 calories per day – is really taxing on her bank account of two bits of string and an expired condom. So off to work she goes, and her boss is pissed. He sets her up to dance twenty minutes straight every hour (usually it’s five or ten minutes only) and demands that she keep her clothes completely on until the after-hours VIP special, not a good way to get tips. Also he tells her to glue some feathers to her ass. For some reason. Of course, she doesn’t really have a choice so she heads up on stage and oh-baby, its the amber-eyed hottie.

Now, I don’t mean to tell Blain how to write her books, but I find it suspicious and hamfisted that the amber-eyed man is the first patron she ever chose to dance for a second time, but it’s also a romance novel so I guess I can just go fuck myself (in more ways than one) and let plot convenience happen. So Sara heads out on stage, takes in the new – and in here overwhelming – aroma of male arousal, and starts putting her assets on display with a nice bit of flamenco on the pole. Now, the amber-eyed man has company again, the other man from before, and a woman who is sitting as close to on that man’s lap as she can while still looking classy; needless to say, Sara’s wolf agrees with her that amber-eyes is sex on wheels and they put on the performance of a lifetime (or something, idk, romance novel shit).

Once she’s offstage again, a coworker named Danny slaps her on the ass, tells her she’s killing it, and asks if Sara is willing to go home some VIPs, a man and his wife, that want her specifically. She says no, and Danny clarifies that they are willing to pay her twenty grand directly AND give the boss another fifty k to let her go with them immediately. Sara, because she is not an idiot, knows that this is an ultimatum, and since twenty thousand will buy a lot of food for her very demanding wolf, she accepts. Danny says “great, now put on this dress and blindfold, and here’s some vodka to steady your nerves!” Sara agrees, because sometimes a bitch just needs a drink, and gets changed; she is then led down to her new clients’ car.

Her clients are pretty cool, surprisingly, and the man has a seriously familiar voice. They tell her that she has been hired to act as a plus one for their friend, whose wife recently passed away and has been taking it really hard lately. After some comments about how “he’s really determined” and had “better get down here before the buffet closes,” the friend, Sanders, finally shows up, angry because he “couldn’t find her.” All his complaints dry up when he opens his door and sees her though, and after the couple in front, introduced as Charles and Wendy Desmond (that’s right y’all, Big Daddy D returns!), have a nice long laugh at his expense.

Sanders, flustered and (by his scent) clearly aroused, takes off her blindfold and who guessed it? We all guessed it, he’s the amber-eyed hottie. The aforementioned arousal is mutual. The four of them drive off to the buffet and decide to have an eating contest, Sara and Sanders versus Wendy and Big Daddy D. Sara destroys them all. They head off to Cirque du Soleil, and after that to their hotel. And by hotel I mean a penthouse sweet at the Venetian ($10,000+ per night).

It’s in their hotel room as they wait for Sanders to park that Sara realizes how her wolf has gone quiet, and she’s answering questions she shouldn’t, and doing whatever she’s told without consciously agreeing to it. Wendy and Big Daddy D continue to ask her about her life and why she accepted their offer, they ask if anyone gave her something to drink who shouldn’t have. Danny spiked the vodka with wolfsbane. But, hold on, Sara thinks, why would they know it was wolfsbane whe-… they know! Sara and her wolf freak out and shift, only instead of the powerful predator they were during the full moon, they come out of an excruciating transformation as a tiny, wobbly puppy.

Sanders, Wendy, and Big Daddy D are very upset to find how new she is as a Fenerec, especially when they can tell she has no pack and no mate to protect her. They do their best to calm her down and figure out how she ended up like this since she did not go through the ritual and it’s supposed to be impossible to become a Fenerec as an adult without it. Big Daddy D confiscates Sanders’ cell phone and demands they get nasty, because apparently Sanders is the third most powerful Alpha on the continent (second is Richard Murphy and first is Big Daddy D) and his previous mate dying means that he is at a big risk of running wild, and that means his entire pack of over a hundred wolves will run wild with him, so the Inquisition has demanded he take a mate of Big Daddy D’s choosing. Big Daddy D, seeing that Sanders was going to court Sara when she was still a human and that Sara was mutually interested, is quite pleased to find that she is now a Fenerec (circumstances notwithstanding) and is therefor won’t get old and will be much sturdier than Sanders’ previous human mate. He asks Wendy to leave the room and return in wolf form, then gets her to help Sara shift back to human. They all sit and eat room service (I want this metabolism dude). He then graciously allows the two to have the room to themselves for the night and takes his wife to get a new room and perform some extracurriculars of their own.

Unsurprisingly, Sara and Sanders almost immediately take a trip to pound town. A most satisfying venture which we don’t get to read about because the book has a plot but no “plot” :(. Regardless, they form a mate bond and Sara is brought into the Seattle Pack, however, the promised warm fuzzys do not come but instead a lingering cold comes through instead. Assuming it’s normal, Sara ignores it and has breakfast with Sanders, before getting dressed and heading off to class for the day. After class Sara returns to her apartment and promptly gets kidnapped again, this is what happens when you split the party. Never split the party.

Sara awakens in a tiled room with a shower head above her, a man is standing above her and is dying her hair bright red. This man introduces himself as Kent, and promptly displays his abilities as a sorcerer by torturing Sara with magic repeatedly. It turns out that Kent is the Sorcerer that killed Sanders’ previous mate, Mary, and he plans to use their fledgling mating bond to torture and break both her and Sanders for a power boost. He drags Sara through a curtain of silver chains, hangs her by her arms from the ceiling, and positions the curtain around her on all sides, trapping her. It then revealed what else the sick son of a bitch keeps in his basement: he’s kidnapped a dozen or so male Fenerec, broken their wills, and turned them into slavering beasts capable only of sex and pain. We also meet Kent’s conspirator, a water witch named Brandy, who is aiding him in exchange for power and also some kinky mad wolf sex.

After a week of repeated torture and abuse, Kent loses his patience and decides to just make a video of him raping Sara and sending it to Sanders to really fuck him up after severing their bond and also her bond to the pack. This turns out to be a mistake, because when he unchains her legs to spread them she whips her feet around his neck and chin and snaps his fucking spine. So satisfying.

However, because this book seems to hate Sara, it’s not just sunshine and roses, because Brandy sucks up all of Kent’s extra powers and becomes ridiculously OP, she makes out with Sara (kind of unnecessary but okay), says that she’ll drown but won’t die, and floods the basement. True to her word, Sara floats in the flooded basement for another week before she gets pulled out by some Inquisitors sent to investigate the scene. The group, and you should remember their names, are Dustin (water witch), Holly (Fenerec), and her mate, Barry (also Fenerec). They get Sara lucid enough to say her name before freaking out and calling Sanders.

Sanders shows up with the kind of hurry usually reserved for a horse with it’s ass on fire, and glomps onto Sara immediately. He brings her back to the hotel, brings her back into the pack (still no warm fuzzys like she was promised), and then they “ensure” that the mating bond is properly restored. The next day, Sanders has to go do work things and wants Sara to just chill out and rest after that harrowing experience. Of course, trying to keep someone in a confined space is probably not how you should treat someone that just escaped from cage-based trauma, so Sara goes outside and sees that Sanders, helicopter mate that he is, has arranged for some big, intimidating Fenerec bodyguards to look after her. But putting someone that was just in a traumatizing situation involving lots of males she didn’t know and couldn’t trust in the exact same situation is a BAD FUCKING IDEA, Sara ditches her guards at the first possible instant, and because she is also a goody-two-shoes she goes off to her former place of work to formally tell her boss that she quits and he can go fuck himself.

The bouncer convinces her in the least suspicious way possible (they split the party again because they are idiots) and she agrees to meet her boss in his office. Of course, that was a terrible idea and the boss sticks a needle full of ketamine and wolfsbane in her arm and ties her up in a sex dungeon; someone in New York (it’s her dad) wants her enough to pay some rather excessive amounts to insure promptness. Luckily for everyone involved, Dustin, Holly, and Barry show up and rescue her again. They are even kind enough to convince Sanders and Big Daddy D not to kill everyone inside the club. Except for the bouncer, because he told Sara that when she came back from New York he was going to “enjoy breaking her and turning her into the perfect slut” and that’s not paragon at all. So he dies a horrible death and there is much rejoicing.

So everyone gets together and has a chat about why someone in New York wants Sara and decide that the best solution is to have Sara show up at the airport as if she had not been rescued and tail whoever tries to collect her. So everyone flies to New York before Sara does to set up the operation. Unfortunately Sara’s flight gets rerouted to Chicago due to bad weather and is then canceled. So Sara calls an emergency number given to her by Sanders and ends up having a chat with the Shadow Pope. They get along swimmingly and Sara asks if she can be let out of her pack because that lingering chill from the pack bond has escalated into a seething mass of hatred that crawls up her spine and beneath her skin and tries to poison her thoughts. The Shadow Pope says she can but has to be directly supervised by her mate still, also that she should call him because he’s freaking the fuck out right now. When Big Daddy D picks up the phone, he reveals that Sanders is so wild with worry that he had to be sedated, then hands her off to talk to Sanders’ second in command for the pack, Joseph. Joseph basically implies to Sara that she’s a piece of shit whore and that she should just kill herself now and save her mate the trouble. Sara responds by not escalating the conversation, not because she didn’t want to but because she gripping her cell so hard in crumples to pieces.

Now without a plan and no way to contact anyone for help (and by that I mean not thinking clearly enough to borrow a damn phone) Sara uses her cash on hand (Sanders gave her several hundred) to buy the first plane to Atlanta and then takes a nonstop bus to New York. Upon arrival in the big apple, she checks her bank account to find that the Inquisition payed her for Kent’s bounty (it’s a dizzying number of zeros). One shopping spree later, she checks in at the Plaza (where she knows Sanders is staying) and sends a package to Sanders room (containing the sexiest underwear she could find). Then heads to a big fancy party that everyone is attending to scout out who has the money to orchestrate Sara’s capture.

At the party, Sara steals the show by being gorgeous™, and Sanders shows up so hot and bothered you could fry an egg on his dick. They have a really cute moment together and then all of those feelings turn to ash when he brings her to meet Joseph, and a submissive female of the pack named Chrissy. So there they are, the two pack members sitting on a sofa staring at Sara and Sanders at the door, Sara tells Sanders that she wants out of the pack, that the pack hates her and wants her gone, and that his promises of love and family are a crock of shit and she will not stand for it even if it meant losing him. And you know what Sanders does? You know what he fucking does?! Slowly and calmly he lets go of her hand, walks away from her, and sits down next to Joseph.

So here Sara is, traumatized after multiple rounds of kidnapping and torture and abuse, she finally makes it back to the one person she can count on to support her, and he completely ignores all of her problems and gets mad at her instead. Good. Fucking. Job. Dick-knuckle. So Sara runs out of the party and to the nearby beach, she feels pretty used right now and is convinced that Sanders doesn’t want or love her and that he would want out of their mating bond if he could – but mating bonds last till death – wait… mating bonds last till death! So Sara walks into the frigid waters of New York in winter, and kills herself from hypothermia and drowning. That’s right. She did not attempt to kill herself; she succeeded in killer herself. Good. Fucking. Job. Sanders. You dick-knuckle.

So Dick-knuckle finally calms down and uses his nose to smell the reek of satisfaction coming off of Joseph and Chrissy, and realizes that – oooOOOH SHIT! - I think I fucked this up guys! And that’s when he checks the mating bond to find that she’s dead. D-E-D DEAD. As is proper for someone who realizes that they might have just drove the person they love to suicide, he freaks out and runs out to the beach. Luckily Dustin was forced to follow along and he gets his team of pet sharks to find her and bring her to shore. They then begin to furiously attempt to resuscitate her and Dustin forces her to shift to her wolf form to recover more quickly. Also, Big Daddy D gets fed up with Sanders’ shit and cleans his clock so he can’t put his foot in his mouth again by misunderstanding Sara’s emotional damage and fucking everything up more.

Once she’s awake again, Sara’s wolf takes charge and runs into the ocean again to get away from those she feels can’t be trusted (everyone). Dustin gives her the counter proposal of “I have three dozen sharks with thirty feet of you and if anyone tries to bully you I will let the sharks eat them, otherwise you can come chew Joseph and Chrissy’s faces off. Faces are high and protein and you have not been eating enough for a newly turned.” This incredibly reasonable offer of shark-bodyguards and tearing off her abusers’ faces coaxes Sara out of the water enough for Big Daddy D to pick her up and give a firm talking to about how a pack is supposed to be. He manages to convince her to join his pack (currently him and his wife) and feel what a pack should be like. The moment the bond clicks into place he showers Sara in his protective care and Wendy supplies her own brand of maternal love, it’s a pretty damn good feeling for someone who had thought that nobody loved nor supported her.

So once she is a bit less hypothermic and a bit more willing to talk, Big Daddy D, Wendy, and Dustin really sit down and listen to what Sara needs to start getting better, and at the top of that list is actually learning about how this whole mating thing works, because everyone was so caught up in their complete contexts they forgot that she knows literally fucking nothing about Fenerec society and culture. The trio finally start helping her to understand the complex knot of pack politics fuckery that just happened and how they plan to stop it from happening again and how to fix her current problems with Sanders and how protect herself from such things in the future.

So Big Daddy D says “fuck the inquisition! You want your hot boy back? I will get you your hot boy back.” And then he forcefully subjugates Sanders, takes control of the Seattle Pack, and isolates the two of them from the pack so they can slowly teach Sara how to use the pack bond. Also he reveals that not only is the Seattle Pack a bunch of fuckups for driving their alpha’s mate to suicide and sending the alpha careening over the edge of insanity, they also were driving the most valuable kind of Fenerec to their death, because Sara is an omega; meaning that Sara’s most immediate instinct is to do anything that the pack needs to keep order and stability, which seriously compounded with the fact that the feeling she was getting from the bond was that her existence was the problem that needed solving. So along the way, Desmond gives Sara the Fenerec version of the Birds and the Bees, which is consisted of: And then they both get really horny and form a mate bond, they remain infertile until they rut in the winter, which is when the female (&$#! and ^#$%&@ as well as ^&%&*$^%$ the male to make him fertile so that they can make puppies. And Sara, who just really needs to make her own damn decision for the first time since choosing Sanders as her mate, asks that Sanders stays with her for the night instead of Wendy or Big Daddy D.

So they head towards the elevator and oh boy, Joseph is in the elevator when the doors open. Sara is so surprised that she immediately lashes out and knocks him the fuck out. One punch right to the chin. She drags Joseph’s body to Sanders like a sack of potatoes and demands that he join her in her room as thanks for not killing his second. Sanders thinks that’s just about the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen aside from Sara (naked), Sara (clothed) and Sara (wolf form), in that order; he happily agrees to spending actual uninterrupted quiet time with her for the first time in the whole goddamn book why can’t they just get a normal relationship Blain? You dick.

Anyways, the couple spends a few hours just being with each other and solving their problems and figuring out how to salvage the trainwreck the pack made of their relationship, and they decide that the best course of action was simple: GIT. FUCKING. N A S T Y . So they fuck for about eight straight hours and also Sara on the sly decides that she’s gonna give the gift of pregnancy to Sanders, since his previous mate Mary couldn’t have kids and he’d been forced to give up the idea of being a father (why don’t Fenerec just adopt? Probably a wolf spirit thing).

NOTE: For the rest of the summary I shall attempt to spell the word “pergant” differently every time.

So although Sanders won’t know it for awhile, Sara is pergnent; this will continue to fuck up everything for the rest of the book. Everybody has a meeting about how to proceed with luring their quarry out into the open, and track down another gala for The Rich Assholes of New York (my favorite reality tv show btw). They plan to have Sanders and Sara arrive together as a married couple to taunt their prey into making a mistake.

However, because once again this book just loves to shit on Sara’s happiness, the limo driver (who works for the Inquisition) shoots Sanders with a dart gun, and he passes out. Sara tears the driver’s throat out with her teeth and grabs his gun, shooting the second assailant positioned outside her door. She makes use of the confusion to drag Sanders into a nearby lake to lose their would-be abductors, then shifts to her wolf form to keep him warm until the drugs in the dart wear off. Unfortunately, because this book just hates it’s protagonist, Sara startles awake to find that Sanders turned into his wolf at some point and he’s currently checked out and mostly wild. He leads Sara on a month long trek across the continental U.S., and becomes a hyper-aggressive near-out-of-control bestial trainwreck that barely even recognized the need to feed and protect his pregart mate.

Around the time they’re somewhere between Montana, Idaho, and Washington (they made excellent time, wow), Sara gets grabbed by a group of strangers with silver cages and collars. While Sanders does circle back to free her, they still manage to put a tight silver and metal muzzle on her. Even though she escapes with her mate, they can’t get the muzzle off, and Sanders has to feed her though the cage piece by piece, she begins starving; her purgansy is at risk. Sanders has already been starving himself to keep her fed, but it’s not enough. He goes out to hunt. He doesn’t return. Sarah starts to wander after his scent, she hasn’t eaten in days, she’s thin and weak, starving and pargnat.

Someone picks her up, it’s Richard Murphy! The bastard pretended to be a concerned motorist and snuck up on her! He helps her take the muzzle off and calls Big Daddy D. Sanders disappeared because he ran in front of Big Daddy D’s SUV and got zapped by Nicolina (if you don’t remember her from previous summaries she’s a wizard). They let Sara hear Sanders’ voice, and when Richard goes in to a convenience store to buy her some food she turns back to human form (this is still okay because the first month of pergalerncy won’t miscarry from shifting). And Richard gets a surprise eyeful of hot naked Sara before grabbing a blanket for her and driving out to a lodge Sanders’ keeps when the pack needs to get away from the city.

Everyone has a sweet reunion (and [re]introduction for Nicolina, Alex, Lisa, and Amber), and then Sara presents herself to her mate so he can finally calm the fuck down and shift back to human so they can tell the story of why they suddenly disappeared on the way to that gala.

It’s decided that someone in the pack and possibly the Inquisition is working for whoever wanted Sara in New York (it’s still her dad, I didn’t really explain it but it’s clearly foreshadowed and everything). But Sanders is an idiot still, so he demands to go to his landscaping company’s greenhouse to make sure his babies (plants not puppies) are doing well. Also Wendy got pregante so that Big Daddy D wouldn’t start burning down forests looking for Sara, because he’s basically adopted her anyway. So Wendy, Big Daddy D, Sanders, and Sara all head down to the greenhouse to check on the plants and let Sara experience Sanders’ love for his work, they get a few Inquisitors to watch the place for safety but none are allowed in because males with permanganate mates are territorial enough to start killing strangers. This is also splitting the party, since they could have had a veritable army and they are stupid for allowing it, because someone starts shooting at them and the two men go out to kill the attackers, leaving the remaining enemies free to capture the two perogent women. Slow claps all around.

So Wendy and Sara get taken to a boat and brought out to sea to evade pursuit and are placed in a room by their captors, who are also Fenerec. The leader of the abductors is a little bitch who thinks he can dominate them enough to stop their transformation at the full moon in a few days assuming they play nice. Sara says that’s some bullshit and, despite the fact that she will almost certainly cause her puppy to miscarry, changes to her wolf to protect her alpha female, Wendy. Over the next several days Sara protects her charge by ruthlessly savaging anyone who crosses her, usually because they tried to give them drugged food. But low and behold the full moon cometh and Sara uses her super-cool-omega-protagonist powers to be as dominant as she needs (really just printing a blank check there) to keep Wendy in human shape so she doesn’t erroneously terminate her pargnency.

Their captors, however, are a bunch of idiots and send in some wolves to take control back; Sara responds to this by subjugating the goons sent after her and then going full rambo on her captors. Sadly, Sara doesn’t get to kill their leader, he gets eaten by a giant fucking shark that jumps onto ship. The shark, satisfied with his meal of big stupid wolf, gives Sara a whole tuna and then leaves. Wendy tells Sara that killing everyone who knows how to pilot the boat was a bad move, also these overly friendly sharks are creepy. So a non-specific amount of time passes, with Sara still a wolf and Wendy still mad that they are drifting somewhere in the pacific, until they see land in the distance. Sara jumps off the boat and swims to shore, and Wendy soon joins her. The boat crashes onto some rocks and splinters to bits, trapping them on the island. Also it’s an island so they sort of jumped the gun on the whole “yay we’re safe” thing.

So they chill on the island, and Wendy sets a bunch of shit on fire to try to attract rescuers; Sara goes hunting and tries to keep Wendy sane, which goes pretty well until the next full moon. Sara succeeds once again in keeping Wendy human, however Wendy is getting pretty fucking pissed about her situation and starts attacking Sara when she gets close. Eventually Wendy gets so fed up that she just hops on a friendly sharks back and leaves the island altogether. Sara remains on the island since she is kinda terrified of sharks and she’s also the size of a adolescent wolf so trying to swim past the horizon is basically suicide. So she starts starving again, because the sharks left to protect Wendy and stopped giving her fish and there are only so many mice and birds a small preganta wolf can eat.

Another unknown amount of time passes and humans land on the island, it’s Dustin! YAAAAAAAY! He picks Sara up and gives his uncle a call (turns out he’s Sanders’ nephew) and says that if they let her stay as a wolf then both she and the puppy will die, and if they force her to shift to human she’ll survive and the puppy almost certainly wouldn’t. Sanders takes this really well. Psych! They have to peel him off the ceiling and sedate him while they ask Dustin to help Sara shift back to human.

Dustin pulls off a real bully for modern medicine in that he uses his powers to not only safely shift Sara back to human, but also got her puppy to shift with her; turns out Sara was paraganet with a true born Fenerec baby. So that’s pretty great.

Sanders comes onto the scene by crashing past all obstacles like a lupine cool-aid man, and he and Sara have a nice moment together and take a nap or something. Sara wakes up first and gives the Shadow Pope a call. They have a chat about how to catch the traitors in the Seattle Pack; it turns out that nobody thought to just pull all their phone records until Sara suggests it. Geniuses, the lot of them. The Shady Pope delivers all the phone records and they discover that around a dozen or so Fenerec have been communicating with a series of New York and New Jersey phone numbers; the biggest offender being a wolf from New York named Arnold, that nobody seems to know where nor when he appeared, and that Joseph was also involved up until the night Sara drowned herself.

Sara takes one look at whose number the traitors were calling and has a panic attack because it is * le gasp * her father’s number. “Oh it’s all my fault” she says, and is then told that that’s probably not true, because the communications of the traitors go back all the way to before Mary’s (Sanders’ last mate) death. It’s decided that Sara’s father is an insane rogue wolf, that he probably killed her mother trying to force her through the ritual, and that he has been aiming to destabilize and take over the Seattle Pack long before he located and targeted Sara, so yay absolvement of guilt onto the mentally ill, progressive!

Everyone has a nice good think about how to lure out Sara’s father (henceforth to be called Dig Baddy), and decide that they will have the ladies head up to an out of the way resort and the men will ambush the traitors and the rogues all together (of course the women can’t help with dangerous things, they’re all pargetna and stuff). The women take this very well. NOT. Wendy, Sara, Nicolina, Lisa, and Amber tell the guys they are going shopping, leave their phones at the hotel, grab a rental car, and book it up to Seattle (they were in Cali at this point). They then proceed to steal Sanders’ truck (not actually because the Shady Papa modified all the paperwork to be in both Sanders’ and Sara’s names) and then one of Sanders’ blankets so Sara can keep his scent with her to remain calm, as one does.

They gaggle of women head up to Canada, cross the border, and head to an Inquisition gun range. Sara tries to learn how to use a Beretta, but it turns out that she is a flinching mess with no ability to aim, however, it turns out that Sara turns from completely inept to perfect marksman when they put a fully automatic Glock 18 in her hands. Everyone recognizes that this is bullshit but if it fits and ships so they put one in her purse and call it a day.

After departing from the gun range, they leave Canada and enter Alaska, where they drive to an out of the way Inquisition airstrip to lure Dig Baddy. She gives him a call and he goes full dumbass and flies out immediately. He arrives, but with Sanders and Richard at his side. You see, Dig Baddy is convinced that the reason Sara ran away and became a stripper was because he didn’t let her have a harem and get her lady garden ravaged on the regular, so his solution is to abduct Richard and Sanders, drug them with copious amounts of wolfsbane and give them to his daughter as hot, sweaty, eager to please peace offerings. Sara responds by handing Richard a gun and saying that shooting her dad would give her the greatest pleasure possible. A Glock 18 empties a 32 bullet magazine in two seconds. Dig Baddy goes from deranged idiot to puddle of meat paste in about that long.

Sara tells Richard that he can’t follow any orders he doesn’t want to if they don’t come from her, and then they get Nicolina to cover the runway in ice so the next plane that comes (filled with Dig Baddy’s goons and the Seattle Pack traitors) will run into the first plane and turn into one hell of a fireball. It works, and they all head back to Seattle to find out what happened to Big Daddy D and company.

They learn that the Inquisition had put Big Daddy D and the rest of the group into protective custody so they wouldn’t run wild without their mates, and they all head to the Desmond’s house to chill. Sara realizes that Sanders misses his pack and decides she needs to deal with her trauma with them so she asks Joseph to bring over all the members he thinks Sanders needs to cheer up. 80 wolves end up in the Desmond residence, and Sara gets over her issues with them after a round of pointing her Glock at them followed by some good old fashioned cuddles. Also, the Shady Poopy bought them a nice house using the bounty technically owed to Sara for dealing with a pack of rogue Fenerec (judging from mentions in other books, it’s like 5 million dollars per head). The End.

#rjblain #witch and wolf #book summary #Beneath a Blood Moon

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

Text

Shadowed Flame by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, terms to know can be found here.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

Matia Evans is the living the dream. As the twenty-something heiress of NYC-based Pallodia Industries, she’s made a name for herself as the beautiful, silent, and business-savvy adopted daughter of CEO and founder Ralph Evans. But of course, all protagonists have to have at least some issues, so Matia is totally colorblind after Ralph killed her mother and nearly killed her in a drunk driving accident as an infant. While her disability makes it nauseating for people to view the slide shows she creates, she can also see smoky projections of people’s emotions. This is most important in how she sees the Vice President of Pallodia, Chuck Harthel, whose aura is black as pitch and oozes towards others as if trying to infect them with his filth.

At the beginning of the story, Matia and Ralph are headed to a business meeting in London (much to Matia’s surprise and chagrin, as her shyness turns her into a stuttering mess and is not appreciated by suspicious airport security). As Ralph and their driver, Sam, chat and get their luggage situated, Matia heads into a shop to grab a camera to support her addiction for photography. One day she hopes to be able to see color, and when that day comes she will look through every picture she’s ever taken and see the world she missed. But in the meantime, she finds herself face to face with a super hot guy, sweaty and shirtless. She takes a good, long, lascivious look, and then snaps a bunch of pictures of him (conveniently not capturing his face), then runs like a startled rabbit through La Guardia airport’s security and into the terminal.

After getting some coffee at a restaurant in the terminal, she calls her dad to check up on his progress through security. Ralph’s only answer is “run for the terminal gate and wait for me” before hanging up. Surprised and worried at his cryptic message, Matia heads towards security to find him. Then the bombs go off.

Awakening in the rubble, Matia immediately begins ordering the other survivors to begin rescuing people while they wait for the emergency services to arrive in an effort to ensure her father isn’t in the rubble. After six hours of leading the survivor’s efforts, in heels no less, Matia finally collapses as the blood loss, smoke inhalation, and exhaustion stops bothering her and starts killing her. It is then that the sexy shirtless guy shows up again, his name is Ryan by the way, and picks Matia up to have a heart to heart and do some first aid. He gives her a bunch of water and tells her all about how much he loves nature and quiet places. It’s pretty romantic, until she stops talking and starts seizing. Luckily for us, Ryan is actually a Fenerec, and he’s been putting wolfsbane in the water he gave Matia, as he takes a gamble and attempts the ritual to turn Matia into a Fenerec too. Her will to live is strong, and the wolfsbane keeps her newly acquired wolf docile and prevents her from transforming in the middle of the survivors’ rescue efforts. That would have been awkward.

So a week later Matia wakes up high as fuck in a hospital, when she is finally lucid enough to tell the doctor her name, she gets upgraded from Jane Doe to primary hospital funding donor and super VIP. Ralph shows up in roughly twelve seconds as a nervous wreck who thought he’d have to bury his baby girl. They have a nice touching moment about how the equipment Pallodia donated is what made Matia’s recovery possible, and then they get an assload of drugs to take care of Matia’s shiny new asthma and possible lung cancer.

The father-daughter duo head home and then promptly to work the next day, Ralph because he hasn’t been working while Matia was missing, and Matia because Ralph would never leave her by herself and home. Once there they find out the surprise, vice president Harthel has actually called a meeting of the board, without telling Ralph about it and in a different room than they are supposed to do them in. Matia convinces her father to hold off on crashing the party until she gives him the signal, and then she hides in the attached kitchenette to hang with the caterers and listen in.

Harthel performs the incredible stunt of shoving both his feet in his mouth so far they come out his ass when he claims that Matia is dead and Ralph has stopped coming to work in his grief (he spoke with both of them that morning) he also wants to elect himself “temporary” CEO and lays out his special-emergency-totally-not-preplanned restructuring program for the company. Matia shows up and goes:

Then Ralph appears and smacks Harthel with the corporate by-laws and fires the bastard. But don’t worry, he’ll be back.

So the board decides that Harthel needs a replacement and they all unanimously vote for Matia to do it, probably as vengeance for tossing a pitcher’s worth of ice water on them to get their attention. Matia finds out Harthel’s secretary has no qualifications and was given an unlivable wage with no benefits in hand written check by Harthel. Which, other than being horribly illegal, is also kind of a dick move. So Matia marches down to HR and starts flipping tables to find out who let that happen and then promptly has to leave to go to a meeting Harthel had scheduled with the New York branch of the company she was supposed to visit in London before. After a delightful Italian dinner with the fabulous company of nervous businessmen who though Pallodia was going to buy them out and dismantle them, Matia has a chat with the head of the group, Dalton Sinclair, about how awesome her business skillz are. That’s when a car rams into Mr. Sinclair and Matia gets knocked out from behind.

She awakens tied up in a dingy lodge in the middle of who knows where in the company of, you guessed it, Chuck Harthel. Who in his anger at being denied control of Pallodia and getting sacked, has abducted her and begins to beat the shit out of her, taking pictures and videos to send to Ralph. After several days, a broken hand, and a copious amount of bruising, Harthel gets a phone call from a mysterious man (spoiler! it’s Ryan) that threatens to skin him alive, tells him exactly where he is, and says he’ll let Harthel live if he leaves Matia behind and gets the fuck out of there. Harthel, being a little bitch, runs like his ass is on fire, but not before dropping Matia in a bathtub and turning on the water to drown her.

Matia awakens, again (this is becoming a habit for the story), to find she has somehow become a puppy and is torn between staying in the tub and drowning, or trying to get out and deal with the raging inferno the rest of the cabin has become. She decides to stay in the tub, and then crawls into the wreckage to find shelter from the blizzard outside among the coals. Not long after, a man finds her and puts her in his coat, carrying her off to his own lodge a few miles away. The mysterious stranger (Ryan) plops her into the sink and washes out all the blood and ash from her fur and she finally becomes lucid enough to tell that the mystery man is Ryan! (Sooooooo surprising, nobody thought that the hot shirtless guy had no purpose in the story at all, right?) Ryan reveals that she is in fact a wolf pup and not a dog, bandages her broken paw, and makes dinner.

Once she’s been fed, he helps her to change back to human and dumps her in his jacuzzi to soak, because he decided that the jacuzzi was more important to hook up to his emergency generator in blizzard than any other appliance. After she is all relaxed from the jacuzzi, they have a chat about being a Fenerec, and Ryan reveals that he is a rare submissive wolf, and a rogue working for the Inquisition. He also reveals that he hates the idea of being in a pack, because he likes freedom and shit, to which Matia says she’d never restrict his freedom, and he is so touched by this that they fuck. Also they’re mates now. As one does.

The next day, Matia wakes up to the delightful feeling of Ritual Sickness, where newly turned Fenerec vomit and shit themselves uncontrollably for three to five days as they go from human to superhuman-wolf-monster. Once that mess is over with, Matia gets up early to get some food (2500 calorie diet turning into a 25,000 calorie diet does that to you) and smells strange wolves outside. Behold! Three Fenerec in their wolfish guise appear before them! It’s Dalton Sinclair and co. (remember them?) they are most displeased with Ryan; you see, turning someone against there will is a no-no, in a public place is a bigger no-no, both at the same time is a H U G E no-no, and Ryan did that, he also then used Inquisition resources without permission to perform an unauthorized operation to rescue Matia, then took her to his house without telling everyone. But they are mates now and she’s cool with it and nobody noticed and nobody died, so it’s all good; they just have to catch they Fenerec that blew up La Guardia. And also kill Harthel since Pallodia secretly hires a bunch of Fenerec and witches on behalf of the Inquisition, so he’s in some deep shit.

Matia starts growling and getting really cranky because her wolf is over protective of her new submissive mate, and doesn’t like that he will let Sinclair just boss him around. Sinclair decides that she is an amusing puppy and heads down the mountain with his wolves to stock up on enough food for the five of them. While they’re gone Matia and Ryan (whose actual name is Dexter Cole, and sounds like the villain from an oscar-bait movie about slavery) turn into wolves, trash the place while they play, and then go hunting. When they return, they get put in timeout for ruining the furniture and shift back in Ryan’s room, and when they reemerge (after Matia tries to seduce Ryan again) they find two new wolves and also Ralph. So Ralph demands Ryan take his shirt off because, and I’m quoting here, “’I only want the best for my daughter, and that includes everything.’”(p.2682 fucking kindle locations man) So after a not terribly funny no-homo joke, it’s revealed that the two new wolves are Matia’s grandparents, that Matia is a fire witch, and that being a Fenerec is repairing the damage to her eyes so she is starting to see in color. That last one happened earlier but the scene wasn’t important enough to mention.

So they make Matia turn into a wolf again, have a moment about how adorable she is as a puppy, then stuff her down Ralph’s shirt so he can snowmobile down the mountain. After a long conversation that sums up what everyone should have already known, they get back to New York and head to Ryan’s apartment there. Matia finally gets to shift back to human, and promptly eats fifteen extra-large meat lover’s pizzas. As one does.

Everybody makes plans to catch the rogue Fenerec terrorist cell, which consists of abducting Matia, hiding her from Ryan so he turns into a nervous wreck, and then tricking the rogues into thinking they can get Ryan to join them. Needless to say, Matia hates this idea and Ryan agrees because he’s too submissive to say no, or something.

They bring Matia over to an Inquisition base and tell her all about how Ryan has been a certified rogue for some sixty years (remember how she’s like 20? yeah.) and that he needs to retire and join a pack before he looses control and gets put down, Matia agrees (because him being a murder hobo for the Inquisition means she won’t get to keep him tied to her bed) and also agrees to join Sinclair’s pack, because the alpha of the pack that owns most of NYC is a little bitch and doesn’t deserve anyone cool in his pack (though he is the alpha of her grandparents but whatever). Matia meets two super sassy old witch twins, who teach her how to use the monitoring equipment to listen to what’s happening with Ryan, they also get to explain how fire extinguishers work as Matia’s witch powers are coming in hot and she starts smoking and her hair catches fire when she’s mad. Eight uncomfortable hours of listen to Ryan breath later and the twitches (twin witches) convince Matia to take a fucking nap already and lock her into a nice hotel room that just so happens to have silver bars beneath the walls and across the windows.

Matia awakens (again) with the horrible feeling that something is terribly wrong, its her mate bond (which gives you psychic powers now? Idk) and the twitches reveal that Ryan was shot because (A+ if you guessed it) Harthel is in command of the rogues! So they lock Matia back in the room and tell her to chill the fuck out while Sinclair’s pack (who happen to be ex-black ops members of the Inquisition) head over to his last known location and try to extract him.

But Matia is the main character and main characters can’t follow simple instructions, so she melts the silver on the window, burning her hands in the process, and breaks the bulletproof glass with her fists before jumping out the window, turning into a wolf (without help for the first time) and using the mate bond to track down Ryan. She comes to a seemingly abandoned aircraft hanger, lights the sucker on fire, sneaks in, grabs Ryan’s body, drags him out into the woods, then goes back in to kill some rogues. The rogues are in the middle of being berated by Harthel, they notice Matia, do nothing, and happily watch as she attempts to rip the bastards face off, she gets thrown off him in the scuffle and before she can go back in Ralph shows up and shoots Harthel right in the face. Ralph for dad of the year.

The rogue pack immediately surrenders to Ralph and Sinclair’s pack behind him, and the alpha asks for mercy for his pack in exchange for his fool cooperation because Harthel was a sorcerer and they could not deny his direct orders. The Inquisition says that’s mostly ok, but the alpha, his second, third, and fourth, as well as their submissive (who was the bomb technician) were summarily executed for their crimes. Also, because happy endings are what books about young women are meant for, Ryan is old enough as a Fenerec that he survived a bullet through the heart, and once he’s back in action they have some wacky attempts at flirting while they are high off their minds on painkillers. The End.

#rjblain #witch and wolf #book summary #Shadowed Flame

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

Text

Blood Diamond by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, terms to know can be found here.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

Jackson Anderson, birth name Dante Jackson Emmett Anderson, is an earth witch with power over the dead. His abilities have complicated his life quite severely over the years for two reasons: one, his younger twin brother is Elliot Anderson, the current Shadow Pope and de facto leader of the Inquisition, with a family very proud to say they are as pure a human bloodline as possible. Two, the Inquisition only tolerates a stain to the Anderson line like Jackson because they believe his only ability is to detect precious gems if he really pushes himself; they would be much less forgiving if they thought his powers were more similar to a necromancer’s than a set of magnifying glasses and a shovel. Our protagonists abilities at the start of our journey consists primarily of identification of the dead. Seeing a corpse, even in a photo, will give Jackson their true name, which is the summation of their identity and possesses enormous power over an individual. Beyond that he can also sense and hear the spirits of the dead, their thoughts near death, and how they died.

Despite the Inquisition being unaware of Jackson’s true abilities, his brother Elliot both knows and frequently uses Jackson’s unique skill set. Many a time has Jackson been in the Inquisition’s morgue to identify bodies, on top of the business he normally does for them. That’s right everybody, Jackson is also an arms dealer and sanctioned smuggler for the Inquisition, the U.S., and also Canada. Now you might be thinking: why the hell does the Inquisition allow the brothers to interact when the elder is a dirty witch they separated from his younger (perfectly human thank you very much) brother when his powers were discovered at the age of 5? Because money, that’s why, and Jackson has bucket loads. Yet it’s very quickly made clear that Jackson is living in a tiny two room cottage in a crappy suburb in Atlanta, “why?” you may ask? Because Jackson has huge emotional baggage despite being a thirty-two year old billionaire.

You see, Jackson is a gentleman. I don’t mean- like- the gross m’lady type, I mean that he doesn’t drink, smoke, swear, call women anything other than their names or ma’am or miss, hit women (even when they are trying to kill him), or leave a woman in the lurch. He is also a widower, he met his late wife, Suzanne, when she was selling herself on a street corner to pay for college; he paid her fee, took her home, refused to sex her, and then offered to pay her fee every night if she promised not to do it anymore. Needless to say, they got married very fast, and only then did he agree to swap uglies. Everyone who knew them said Suzanne was a bitch and a gold-digger who never returned Jackson’s love, but Jackson persevered and ignored all of the criticism. However, five years before the story begins, Suzanne disappeared while six months pregnant, and has been presumed dead. Why did Jackson not look at a picture of her to check? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

So Jackson is a bit of a recluse now since all his friends keep trying to set him up with available women, but he is adamant in his wedding vows. And on one fateful night, his brother shows up, tells him to drive his beloved armored truck, The Red Beast, up to Oconee Park and oversee an operation to kill some rogue Fenerec that have been murdering humans who enter the park.

After waiting the demanded amount of time in the truck, Jackson opens and envelope containing pictures of the operatives and the targets to check the progress. The picture on top is actually a selfie of his younger brother flipping him off, and then a picture of his boss, who happens to be a very pretty lady with Elliot giving a thumbs up to the side. After that he sees all the pictures of the operatives and wouldn’t y’know it: they dead. Then he looks at all the targets, and of course, only one survives, a very pretty woman with the same jade green eyes that Suzanne had. Of course, because protagonists can’t follow simple instructions, Jackson runs off into the woods to find her instead of leaving in his nice safe truck.

He finds himself in the middle of a massacre, bodies everywhere, both the wolfs and the inquisitors. As he walks about, he trips over one wolf that’s still kicking, well… not kicking because there’s a silver bullet in her leg but you get what I mean. After having a nice session of “please don’t bite me while remove this bullet ma’am,” the she-wolf hitches a ride in Jackson’s arms back to the truck, where she shifts back to human and gives Jackson a lap dance while he’s trying to give her first aid. Kinky. Then she tells him her name is Evelyn and that a third party was the group that killed everyone, also they are planning to position themselves at the exits of the park and grab Jackson (dodged a bullet there I guess). So Jackson digs through the truck and sets it up with thirty pounds of c4 and enough evidence to make it look like he’s dead. Then proceeds to blow the fucker sky high.

Jackson and Evelyn then hike through the woods, he in a suit and she in nothing but his suit coat, all the way to Evelyn’s place, where they pick up some more clothes, a bunch of cash, and a motorcycle. They then road trip it down to Miami, where they check in to a hotel and give Jackson’s friend, Zach, a call. Zach says dead people aren’t allowed to pull these sorts of antics and arranges a room on his ship the Wave Dream to get them to Canada, where the Inquisition doesn’t have the power to pursue Evelyn anymore. While aboard, a metric fuckton of inquisitors show up, including Jackson’s brother, Elliot.

So Jackson heads down to the cargo bay where (hopefully) the inquisitor’s don’t search while looking for his presumed killers. As he heads into the office of the cargo manager, Brandon, he finds it empty except for a crazy woman who has braided her hair in the shape of a noose and tries to gank the shit out of him. Of course, fighting back would mean he’d have to hit her, and that’s not his way; so instead he sprays hand sanitizer in her eyes after she nearly shattered his knee, then escapes into the maze of cargo. Too bad a bum leg can’t outrun a crazy woman, and he captures him after stabbing a needle full of the good shit into his arm. Jackson sorta floats into the aether at this point and when he’s coherent again he finds himself duck-taped to Brandon and in a great deal of pain. Luckily the crazy woman is an idiot and made it difficult but not impossible to escape the tape. The two limp off towards the office, which now sounds like someone’s having a shootout. Upon reaching the catwalk to the office he sees the crazy woman being torn apart by Evelyn in her wolf form, which is now the size of a horse.

As the crazy woman dies her soul grabs onto his and tries to drag him down to hell with her, she almost succeeds, but the other spirits that follow Jackson around decide that that’s not very paragon of her and save him. A few hours later, he wakes up to the sound of his brother saying he was a stupid piece of shit and if he ever pulls that again he would actually kill him. To which he says “good to see you too little bro” before a very pleased Evelyn barges in and says that Elliot can go eat a dick while she goes and eats Jackson’s dick thank you very much. It’s here that we start meeting some old friends, Richard and Alex Murphy of the Yellow Knife pack in Canada (remember them from the last book?) are there and pleased as punch to see their old friend alive and mostly well. Victoria Allison Elisabeth Mayfield Hanover is back and toooooootally not in love with Elliot, and the pair definitely don’t become mates after she punches him in the face or anything.

So they go looking through the crazy lady and her friends’ stuff before finding a blood red diamond that makes anyone with even a hint of magic cringe in its presence, and of course the spirits of the dead take control of Jackson’s body and forces him to pick up the damned thing. It as at this point that shit goes sideways, because the diamond is full dead people, and thousands of names fill his head, but the last two are what breaks him: Suzanne Annemarie Greene, and Jacqueline Emily Anderson; his wife who died without taking his name, and his daughter that he thought was never born.

So Jackson types all of the names up and searches for them in all the systems he has access to. Turns out they are all from Canada, with an average age of 17; Jackson reveals the true nature of his abilities to Evelyn and then they fuck. No. Really. This is when they fuck. Don’t believe me? You’re right! They actually fucked before the bit with the diamond and I forgot to mention it. Oops. Well anyway Jackson shows Zach his daughter’s birth certificate and has a nice long cry, Richard and Elliot come in and talk about Fenerec mating, and then they fuck… again. The next day (morning? Evening? Time seems to have fallen apart during the sexy times) the pair have a nice chat about figuring out who is doing all this, and then go play hide and seek in the cargo bay; not the smartest choice when surrounding by highly competitive werewolves but what do you do? Evelyn and Jackson, having confirmed their mating bond with hot, sweaty tiddlywinks, get on like a house on fire, and it’s decided that they are gonna keep up the ruse of Jackson being dead by having him impersonate his twin Elliot all the way to Candanda. Everything goes swimmingly, except for when Richard, Evelyn, Victoria (who’s in on the act), and Jackson try to fly from Ontario to Thunder Bay. Jackson, who was pretty stressed out, decided to take a nap while in the air; he wakes up in a ruined, half-submerged cockpit with a tree so close to his face that a few more inches forward in the crash would have torn his head clean off, and the three Fenerec are nowhere to be found.

Twelve hours, three chainsaws, and a team of astounded rescue workers later, and Jackson wakes up in a hospital greeted by his friend and contact with the Canadian government, Gerald. The doctors then prescribe an entire pharmacy’s worth of painkillers, and they get him super fucking high, before taking him back to Gerald’s place to hang with his wife and daughters. In the meantime Richard, Victoria, and Evelyn are running loose as Fenerec, and Richard’s wife, Nicole, is coming down from their place to put the smack-down on them before they get themselves killed. Then Jackson’s father shows up and goes “hey son, sorry we abandoned you when you were five for the crime of being magic, peace offering and can we be invited to the wedding this time?” Jackson’s takes this pretty well, and tells his dad to go fuck himself. His father takes this as a good sign.

Once his dad’s gone, Jackson tells Gerald about his daughter and all the dead people used to make the red diamonds, Gerard tells him that he’ll get people right on it with a quickness, then takes him in for more tests at the hospital. Six hours later, they head to Gerald’s office, where they get a call in from Montreal that they will pay him any sum necessary to get the best inquisitors they can find to come in and destroy whoever has been killing witches, Jackson knows just the guy. They return to Gerald’s home to find six more cars, and a bunch more Fenerec, particularly Richard, Victoria, and Evelyn, who is sleeping on his bed with Gerald’s daughter’s prized stuffed bunny, Sir Rufus Fuzzybottoms. They have a short reunion before Nicole comes up and tell him to go see Richard before he strangles someone. As soon as the two make eye contact Richard knocks him over and tears all his clothes and bandages off for a very intimate “inspection.” Suitably convinced that Jackson is more or less intact, all the Fenerec have a grand old time dog-piling and sleeping on top of Jackson, because pack logic.

So Gerald tells Jackson and Evelyn to hop on a plane with him to Thunder Bay to talk to a daycare that took care of Jacqueline (Jackson’s daughter, in case you’ve forgotten). On the way Evelyn convinces him to open up the peace offering from his father, it turns out to be his and her watches, phones, and wedding rings (that fit perfectly, stalker bastard). At the daycare they meet Nirliq, an omega Fenerec who runs the place, and tells them that Suzanne told everyone that Jackson was an abusive bum, and that she was violent to Jacqueline because Jacqueline hated her by the time she was three, and always demanded to see her father while in public. Jackson at this point finds himself really wondering why he was so loyal to this woman. The three amigos say adios to Nirliq and go up to the res to see a Fenerec woman (for some reason in these books all Fenerec females are referred to as bitches, and no one cares, not even the women themselves) who was close to Jacqueline.

Sadly, instead of the woman they go to meet, they encountered a number of Fenerec males, who didn’t believe Nirliq when he called ahead and thought they should kill the “abusive pig that hurt Suzanne.” Their plan goes awry however, when Evelyn takes a punch for Jackson and shatters her shoulder, at which point Jackson goes apeshit, cause a 5.1 earthquake and throws down the sort of dominance that makes hardened Fenerec piss themselves. After a several hour long staring contest, consisting mostly of Evelyn telling him not to kill the Fenerec, they learn that Suzanne had some “friends” in Montreal she might have gone to before she vanished a few years ago. Also, the pack’s alpha pair was murdered not long after her disappearance by some teenagers, who were then killed and buried behind the place, the only problem is that those teenagers are actually spirits in the red diamond, and were dead long before they killed this alpha pair.

Everybody reconvenes, has a chat about how Jackson is getting really OP and has started to heal at the speed of a Fenerec, and then they all decide to head to Montreal to look for clues. In Montreal, they head towards a lake that is near where a large number of the dead witches disappeared, only to find that is full of hundreds of bodies tucked underneath, the only issue is that they weren’t buried by others, they walked into the lake and dug themselves in. Which is… actually pretty terrifying. So while everybody else deals with the cops, Jackson walks the two blocks back to the hotel, only to be stopped by a man with a gun who thinks that he’s his brother, Elliot.

The man introduces himself as Giggles McGee (don’t remember, too lazy to look it up), and he represents his firm, Basin, and that they have a cure for supernaturalism. Jackson takes this pretty well all things considered, and only after he figures out where they are taking them does he “accidentally” causes another earthquake and drops a bridge on him. Once that’s squared away, he heads to Basin’s warehouse base to fuck shit up. He sneaks in and the ghosts tell him the passwords to a computer and he sends all the data he can get his hands on to Zach (remember him?). The ghosts then guide him into their underground lab, where he finds all the dead witches, or I should say, he finds their living bodies standing around in cages as soulless slaves. After discovering that using true names of the spirits can return them to their bodies and revives them, Jackson stumbles upon none other than Suzanne. After he revives Suzanne, she mistakes him for his brother too, and brags about how much of a disgusting troglodyte Jackson is. Jackson responds by slapping her, then forces her to show him the weapons stash before killing all the guards and freeing the prisoners; too bad the spirits were controlling him and he zones out, giving Suzanne the opportunity to pick up a rifle off the ground and blasting a giant hole in Jackson’s chest, shattering the red diamond he was wearing around his neck. He tells Suzanne to burn in hell. Suzanne says she’ll see him and his filthy devil-spawn daughter there first. And then the ground starts spewing lava and incinerates her. Jackson, somehow able to stand with a hole in his chest, heads out from the lab before the lava, that was following behind him like a puppy, destroys the rest of the place. At which point Jackson passes the fuck out.

Meanwhile, the rest of the group gets a call from Zach, who tells them they have the location of Jacqueline. They and the hundred inquisitors hired by Canada, storm the place only to find hundreds of confused witches that only speak French, and a malnutritioned five year-old that decides Evelyn (who is at this point, a horse-sized wolf soaking in blood) is her new mommy and that no one is allowed to touch her except for Jackson. They then return to Montreal to find out Jackson did not return to his hotel room like he was supposed to and instead became a holey-man in the hospital.

A week later, Jackson (unaware of all of that stuff with Jacqueline) awakens a very cranky boy, he is also convinced that shattering the diamond killed Jacqueline forever, and no one bothers to correct him. The bastards. So they put him on the kind of medicines that could get an elephant high, and he walks off when no one is watching to have coffee with a Catholic priest and talk about witchcraft. Until everyone shows up in a tizzy and they present Jackson with Jacqueline, who due to her mother’s horrible habits does not believe she is worthy of eating something other than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and that there is no such thing as a swear word. A fainting Jackson, a five year-old that bites anyone she doesn’t like and talks like a sailor, and one explanation about how babies are made (by the five year-old to Jackson’s mother) later, and all is good with the world. The End.

#Blood Diamond #rjblain #witch and wolf #book summary

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

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Everything you should know for R.J. Blain’s Witch and Wolf universe

I’m making this so that I don’t have to piece together important terms for each of these damn books, I plan to do this with series that I cover in the future as well.

A clarification of Witch and Wolf: First off, some confusing nomenclature. The Witch and Wolf series consists currently of three books, with a fourth already announced; they are Inquisitor, Winter Wolf, and Blood Diamond. The as of yet unreleased fourth installment is slated as Silver Bullet. Now, the Witch and Wolf universe contains the Witch and Wolf series of books, but also two more (supposedly) series, several stand alone books, and a set of short stories; they are Pack Justice (Nature of the Beast series), Karma (Balancing the Scales series), Shadowed Flame (Standalone), Beneath the Blood Moon (Standalone), and the Tales of the Winter Wolf (Short stories, currently 6 volumes).

The Inquisition: A shadowy organization managed by normal humans but presides over “allowable” supernatural behavior; these allowed behaviors can be broken down into how they treat each type of supernatural population.

Inquisition on Fenerec: All Fenerec are required to have an alpha and be part of a pack, this alpha must be approved of by the Inquisition. Fenerec that do not wish to be in a pack must seek approval by the Inquisition and agree to either be a part of the Inquisition staff or be aggressively monitored. Any Fenerec that does not abide by these rules will be terminated. Any Fenerec that injures a Normal outside of very specific circumstances will be terminated.

Inquisition on Witches: All witches are required to be registered with the Inquisition; witches that do not register are subject to imprisonment or termination dependent on the breadth of their abilities. Witches are “encouraged” to work for the Inquisition, witches bonded to a Fenerec may not be subject to this encouragement.

Inquisition on Shamans: See above sections on Fenerec and Witches.

Inquisition on Wizards: Wizards cause extreme damage to human infrastructure by their mere presence, they also possess the capacity to “acquire” the abilities of other supernaturals, making them extremely dangerous. They are to be terminated with great prejudice.

Inquisition on Sorcerers: A Sorcerer’s power comes only from harming others, they have no usefulness in any capacity beyond same. Terminate with great prejudice.

Inquisition on Necromancers: Necromancers have no usefulness to the protection of humanity and their powers are very similar to a sorcerer’s, save that they must always kill their victims to gain power. Terminate with great prejudice.

Inquisition on Humans: Humans are to be protected from all forms of the supernatural. Humans who are aware of the supernatural must agree to (a.) be a part of the Inquisition, (b.) sign a non-disclosure and be subject to extreme scrutiny, or (c.) be imprisoned or terminated. Any supernatural found to be “innately harming to humans” is to be terminated, any supernatural that harms a human in any capacity beyond self-defense at risk of death is to be terminated.

Witches: Witches are a type of human with magic abilities aligned to a specific element. They have the highest population of supernatural beings by far, with most having so little power they are indistinguishable from humans or never learn of their true nature. Nevertheless witches in general possess a few important abilities.

Bonding with a Fenerec: Witches are able to form a bond with one or more Fenerec, this bond is possible due to their innate connection with nature. The bond enables the witch to compel a Fenerec to express one of their natures (that of a human or that of a wolf) more strongly and stably. A great deal of why powerful witches are tolerated by the Inquisition is because they are so useful in keeping Fenerec under control. Fire witches are considered the best at this technique.

Sensing: While not all witches possess the talent, every element type of witch has their own form of sensing, this sixth sense can range in power from a subtle feeling to being as persistent and detailed as sight or hearing.

Shaping and Manipulation: A common talent among witches, there are very few who do not possess at least some form of manipulation for their elements. The strength of the ability ranges greatly, from causing a pebble to wiggle in exchange for a headache to causing an earthquake at the slightest provocation.

Witches by element:

Fire: Fire witches tend to have short tempers and strong personalities, they excel in the sensing aspect of witchcraft, and many possess the ability to perceive auras; they make excellent judges of character. Generally, only very powerful fire witches can manipulate flame and heat. Also, many fire witches will not survive the awakening of their powers, which often involve suddenly lighting themselves and everything around them on fire.

Earth: Earth witches tend to be level headed but blunt, they usually have shaping abilities over other types. Earth witches with sensing tend to be able to either have something similar to sonar, but may also be able to find precious metals and gemstones. A less known and approved of aspect is the earth’s connection to death, and some witches possess the ability to interact with the dead in a similar way to a necromancer.

Water: Water witches have water powers, they can also do healing stuff I think? They don’t come up much in the books but they are worth noting.

Air: Air witches have powers of some sort, they come up even less, in that I don’t remember a single time where an air witch actually shows up outside mentioning their existence.

Wizards: Wizards are a type of magical human that is often associated as a myth, because they are rare to the point that many consider them extinct. Their powers revolve around the manipulation of electricity, heat, and cold. They are killed on sight by most in the know because wizards who don’t have absolute control of their abilities will cause power outages, explosions, and other large disruptions of human infrastructure and safety. Wizards also have the unique attribute of not being limited only to their base skill set, that is to say: if another supernatural being can do it, a wizard can too, if others can’t, a wizard can still do it but a price needs to be paid.

Falsified Identities: Something that apparently every important character can get and is somehow still surprising when other characters find out about them.

Sorcerers: A type of magical human that powers their abilities through the suffering of others; while not all serial killers are sorcerers, all sorcerers will become serial killers. Sorcerers are under the category of “kill on sight” for good reason, their powers feed off of suffering and it is extremely pleasurable for them to suck the life out of those around them.

Necromancers: A type of magical human very similar to a Sorcerer, they do not necessarily need to torture their victims for power, as they gain power purely through death. They are associated with reading of entrails, summoning and controlling spirits, and raising undead horrors from beyond the veil. They are killed on sight.

Shamans: A type of magical human that, on the surface, is similar to a Fenerec. Shamans possess an animal spirit that follows and aids them, however, they are not beholden to the spirits demands as a Fenerec, nor are they forced to change shape during the full moon. Some shamans have heightened senses from the spirit animal but many do not. They are virtually indistinguishable from a normal human if one does not witness their transformation, and when in their animal form they are identical to a normal member of their spirit’s kind. The length of a shaman’s transformation is variable per the individual.

Vampires: Totally a myth… for now.

Fenerec: Basically werewolves, Fenerec possess two aspects: human and wolf, that share control of body. For the sake of explaining I will separate this into several sections: normal abilities, weaknesses, types, packs, and pack statuses.

Abilities of a Fenerec: Fenerec have the following abilities, these usually strengthen with age.

Increased strength and speed: She may look like a 5’5 Southern Belle, but she can dead-lift a car if she wants to.

Regeneration and healing: If it doesn’t kill them instantly, it only serves to make them mad. They heal even faster if they shift into their wolf form.

Pseudo-Immortality: Alongside their regeneration, they will not get physically old.

Turning into a wolf: Every full moon a Fenerec is compelled to change into their wolf form. This can be avoided if they have significant willpower or are prevented from doing so by a powerful alpha. While in wolf form they’re heightened abilities increase even further, though often at the expense of losing themselves to their wolf instincts.

Weaknesses of a Fenerec: Fenerec have the following weakness and needs, these may alleviate with age.

Silver: Fenerec are horribly allergic to silver in all forms, the older the silver is, the more it hurts them. Making skin contact will result in a cross between a third-degree burn and tarnishing. The longer a Fenerec is exposed, the weaker they become, being exposed for too long will kill them. Fenerec can resist the effects of silver if they are much older than the silver, but it is not perfect and they are never immune, even if it doesn’t injure them it is still excruciatingly painful.

Wolfsbane: A drug that quiets the wolf spirit’s influence, rendering exposed Fenerec effectively human but without any free will, overdose is fatal.

Mates: Wolves are social creatures, and require a mate. Mates need not be Fenerec, but often are because Fenerec mate for life, and usually kill themselves upon their mate’s demise. Fenerec-Fenerec pairings are rare due to the ratio of Fenerec females to Fenerec males being heavily male-biased(est. between 1:6 and 1:9). Fenerec experience a mating season during the winter that drives them to produce offspring, usually by finding a mate. Fenerec that refuse to find a mate have a much harder time controlling their wolf instincts. Mating also does not require sex, it can be formed by an implicit commitment and intimacy with a partner – but it’s usually centered on sex.

Food: Fenerec eat a lot. And I don’t mean a bit more than usual, I mean something on the order of going from needing 2500 calories a day to 10,000 calories a day. Wolves who do not eat regularly and in large quantities of meat and hardy meals will find it more challenging to manage their wolf instincts.

Pack: Fenerec need a pack. Those that don’t are lying or insane. Fenerec who are not part of an explicit pack with other Fenerec often create an implicit one with a close circle of friends and family. Fenerec need the security of the pack hierarchy and mutual affection and care to effectively manage their wolf side, Fenerec that are separated from their packs or otherwise isolated will very quickly devolve into a husk of their former selves; wild and acting purely on instinct.

Human/Wolf duality: Fenerec are beings with two sides that must be constantly balanced and maintained. Feneric often associate strongly with their human side, seeing their wolf as an added passenger, but this is not the case; the wolf aspect is just as intelligent and innate to the individual as the human aspect, and failure to respect that is a recipe for disaster. Individuals are always handling the world using two distinct viewpoints, and often need to train themselves to manage these competing ideologies. Those that fail to balance their two sides will lose themselves to the pull of the wolf, they run wild, and are both volatile and violent in equal parts. It is often impossible for older Fenerec to live as normal people, they carry the air of an animal with them at all times and even a completely normal human can sense that they aren’t quite right; not only that, but the pull of the wolf grows stronger with time, each full moon can spell disaster for an old wolf not prepared to put out an iron will. Fenerec also need to manage the urge to hunt since in the modern day it is considered bad form to kill a man because he was running and that made you hungry; Fenerec often deal with this problem by becoming filthy rich. They see the competition and cutthroat nature of business as a very satisfying form of the hunt.

Types of Fenerec: There are three ways to become a Fenerec, and each has its own connotations.

Fenerec by choice: A human who has become a Fenerec via a special ritual, they are exceedingly the most common, and usually do not possess any special abilities. The ritual is supposed to only be by choice and is thought to be impossible without consent, however, it is still possible for someone to be forced into becoming one. A forced ritual is almost always fatal.

True born Fenerec (human): The rarest of the three, only one such Fenerec is known to exist. They are a human child born to wolves, few survive; they struggle to handle their wolf aspects.

True born Fenerec (wolf): A wolf cub born to human parents, or a child that is born a Fenerec to Fenerec parents. They tend to be stronger and more dominant than others, they also have trouble maintaining an illusion of humanity when out of wolf shape.

Fenerec in Packs: As mentioned previously, Fenerec have a strong urge to be part of a pack, and it is actively detrimental to avoid this instinct. Fenerec are extremely close to their pack mates, often to the point of have virtually no boundaries between each other. It is very common to see both male and female Fenerec engage in intimate physical contact as a form of mutual assurance. Fenerec are also protective of anyone they consider as “their’s” and are very possessive- this include women, children, the elderly, and anyone even remotely construable as dependent on them in any way shape or form. Coming between a Fenerec and those they consider pack is practically suicide.

Statuses within a Pack: There four different categories into which Fenerec are sorted.

Dominants: Dominant Fenerec carry mainly the urges to protect dependents and control everything around them. They give way only to a Fenerec dominant enough to force them to, anything dominants consider a challenge to their authority is often met with violence, even something as benign as making extended eye-contact.

Submissives: The complete opposite of a dominant Fenerec, a submissive will let most walk all over them to avoid conflict, other Fenerec immediately recognize them as dependents, and the need to safeguard them can seriously bolster a pack’s cohesion and self-control.

Alphas: The alpha is the head of the pack, all wolves below them feel safe beneath them, if that stops being the case then the alpha will shift heaven and earth to set it right. Alphas tend to be old, powerful wolves who can help others to stay human without losing themselves in the process.

Omegas: The rarest of all wolves, the omega has all the protectiveness of an alpha, yet does not carry the need to always assert control, their wolf aspect is extremely stable and calm the wolves of the Fenerec around them. They are heavily treasured by their packs, and can serve to stabilize the pack structure even without the presence of an alpha.

Canada: A magical place that somehow keeps the Inquisition off their turf by being polite yet terribly inconvenient to deal with.

#witch and wolf #rjblain

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

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Winter Wolf by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, first we need the basic terms for this world. Also, sorry I messed up and spelled Fenerec as Feneric, my bad.

Fenerec: Werewolves, they’re weak to silver and must constantly keep their animal selves under control. There are three types of Fenerec separated into four social stratas.

TYPES

-Born Fenerec: the children who are born Fenerec to Fenerec parents.

-Made Fenerec: Humans who became Fenerec through a special ritual, this usually requires the person’s consent but it can be forced upon them.

-True Fenerec: Fenerec born under one of two circumstances- a human baby born to wolves, or a wolf pup born to human parents- they are extremely rare, valuable, and powerful Fenerec

STRATAS

-Alphas: Protectors of the pack, they are the strongest and most dominant in their packs.

-Dominants: Fenerec that have instincts pushing them to take control of their surroundings and protect those they see as reliant on them.

-Submissives: Fenerec who do not feel the need to be in charge, they are valued in their packs because dominant wolves are soothed by their presence, since they don’t see them as rivals.

-Omegas: Fenerec who do not feel the need to be in charge yet still have all the same protective instincts of dominants; they are the rarest and can play any role necessary to stabilize their pack.

Witches: Humans who have connection to a specific element of nature; fire, water, air, or earth. They gain powers based on that element as well as boosted health and lifespan. They can also form a pact with Fenerec to help preserve their humanity.

Wizards: Humans who can basically break most of the laws of magic so long as they are able to afford the price. They are killed by other supernatural beings on sight.

Sorcerers: A human whose magic is powered by harming others, in order to become more powerful they must rape, murder, and torture others. Needless to say, they are killed on sight.

The Plague: A disease that only affects Fenerec. It is magic and quasi-intelligent, manipulating other illnesses into infecting the host. The host’s fever then gives the proper breeding ground for the plague, and when the host shifts, they become trapped in a half state – that is to say – their bodies rip themselves apart and don’t coalesce into their wolf form. There is no cure, and only true born Fenerec are immune.

The Inquisition: A shadowy group that is part of most modern government and was born from the Catholic Church. They “protect” normal people from the supernatural. They often demand witches join them and wolf packs register themselves in exchange for the lives. They kill almost all other supernatural beings on sight, and offer massive bounties for same, as well as “rogue” witches and wolves.

The Shadow Pope: this person with a dumb-ass name is the head of the Inquisition, below him are the Archeons and below them are the Cardinals.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

Just so you know, this is technically a prequel to Inquisitor.

Meet Nicole Thomas, real name Nicolina Desmond, an actress living in L.A. struggling to make a living because her body is covered in huge scars and she has chronic laryngitis (turns out directors don’t give speaking roles to many women with sandpaper for a voice). She is currently living under a falsified identity for three important reasons; one: Nicolina Desmond was a big time singer before she lost her voice and she’s too ashamed to live in the shadow of her past self, two: her parents and her twin sister are Fenerec and she’s terrified/hates all Fenerec after an incident scarred her severely and put her in a coma for a year, and three: she’s a wizard and if anyone catches on she’s a dead woman.

Now, unfortunately we will have to digress from the story to talk about what a wizard’s abilities are, because they are kinda complicated. Wizard powers are focused entirely on the manipulation of energy. The simplest applications of this are the control of electricity and heat. A wizard does not produce their own power, it needs to be absorbed from other sources. This means that wizards have a set of senses attuned to the most easily acquired energy: the electricity used by normal humans. Coupled with a wizards ability to sense and control electric current and the devices they follow, the energy they absorb can be used for basically anything the wizard can fathom. A simple rule of thumb is: if some one else can do it, then a wizard can do it, and if no one else can do it, then a wizard can probably do it anyway but someone might die to make it happen.

Okay, now we can get on with it. The book begins with Nicole entering a mall because her agent, Dominic, told her to buy a bestselling zombie apocalypse novel for “homework.” So she as she makes her way into the mall, she begins opening as many battery destroying apps on her phone as she can, since her magic’s need to control the electricity around her can be channeled into keeping her phone topped up rather than causing catastrophic power failures. After a nerve-wracking (for her, not the reader) walk to the book store, she approaches a woman whose phone is dying and “accidentally” bumps into her to give the battery a boost. Oddly enough the woman recognizes her from her movies despite the fact she’s always an extra. They talk briefly before the woman get a phone call and when she answers we find out her name is Laura, before she excuses herself to talk to whoever called her. After seeing Laura off, Nicole asks a friendly employee named Scott for help finding the novel. As they chat they grab the book and head towards the registers to check out, however, nothing gets to be simple in this sort of book so when she’s at the register and talking to Scott and another employee the power goes out. Now Nicole already knows that power outages are usually her losing control of her powers and begins to panic, and then as she thinks about the Inquisition finding her she starts bordering on a panic attack as Scott starts screaming like a banshee. SPLAT! The power comes back on it’s own to reveal that where Scott once stood is a twisted mess of flesh and there is blood everywhere. So this whole store is just staring in shock until the police appear, that’s when the vomiting and the screaming starts.

So the Police rounds everybody up and questions them about the events of the evening, Nicole in particular is questioned by the lead investigator, Detective Harding, as she was standing right next to Scott when the incident occurred. Detective Harding proves to be a pretty swell guy, and he offers to drive Nicole back to the mall from the station to pick up her car. Unfortunately it only get more complicated by the fact that on return, the pair find Nicole’s car to have been broken into, with the windows smashed, the seats slashed to pieces, and the only thing she left in their, the car manual, ripped up and strewn about the interior. It is then that Nicole gets a call from an unknown number, at Harding’s request she answers on speaker phone, only to have the caller say they have a message for Nicolina Desmond, to which Nicole responds with a not at all suspicious “nope. Wrong number. No one by that name here. Definitely not. Bye.” before handing her cell over to Detective Harding as evidence of this odd series of coincidences. It’s just a shame that her car getting fucked up serves no purpose in the story except to give the detective a reason to request Nicole to enter witness protection. Of course, someone who is trying to hide from the Inquisition would certainly go into a program they designed, right? Nicole gives a rousing but polite “Not on my life motherfucker” and asks for a ride home.

The next day she goes to a storage container she rents and picks up some stuff to investigate what happened to Scott. Because trying to find out what happened to someone you knew for all of five fucking minutes is definitely worth risking discovery (and death) by doing some serious wizardry right? So Nicole grabs a a silver mirror, a bronze celtic knot, some candles, ancient Egyption coins called debens she stole from a museum, rocks- I mean- focus stones, and a little book that just so happens to talk and tricked Nicole into becoming a wizard after stealing her voice, as one does. Our good ol’ main character uses all the blood Scott so kindly sprayed all over her to send her mind back in time to the moment of his death. Of course, the book tells her that you can’t be in two places at once so instead of free floating as a spirit or watching through her own eyes, she has to live the moment as Scott himself, which offered some interesting insights. Scott was actually stalking Nicole through the store, turns out he was a Fenerec whose wolf decided it wanted her as a mate the moment he laid eyes on her, so when the lights went out and he could smell her adrenaline and panic, his wolf freaked out and forced him to shift to protect her. This was a really big problem because Scott was infected with the plague, and thus he exploded into a shower of viscera all over her. Good job Scott. Really made her feel safe there. Dipshit.

After this set of revelations, Nicole has an important meeting with her toilet about the contents of her stomach deciding they wanted to exit the way they came, and then she goes to meet with her agent. Dominic is your standard metrosexual whose main form of humor is sass, and he informs Nicole that he has gotten her a closed audition at Silver Moon Studios (real subtle there) the next day. This basically means that they are gonna ask her to try a scene and as long as she doesn’t fuck it up really bad she will be handed a contract. Seeing this as a much needed opportunity, Nicole gets an early rest before heading to the studio.

At the studio they strip her down and the make up lady goes “not enough scars bro” which is pretty weird overall but Nicole runs with it since the scars covering her everything are not being used as a reason to mock her, which is pretty cool I guess. Then they put her in some clothes, hand her a live rifle (with blanks in it) and say that this will be her new best friend, along with her two co-stars: the biggest canines she’s ever seen. After she witnesses everyone in the studio act like these absolutely massive “German shepherds” (cough werewolves cough) are a bunch of terrifying monsters, she slaps the handler upside the head and calls him a disgrace. The dogs (lol) get along with her like a house on fire and they do a quick scene before the director says they need some action shots of them all with another actress named Marie. Then the entirety of the rigging falls down on top of them. Luckily the dogs (lol) make a quick save and the two ladies are just fine. But Nicole finds something suspicious with her electronics-senses: someone forcefully bypassed the breaker, and all the wires surrounding them are still live and fatally dangerous. But wizards are wizards and wizards are op as hell so she shorts the entire system with her mind and all is good. Until the cops come bursting in cuz they had been watching Nicole to see if anyone was targeting her. Nicole asks Dominic to take care of the dogs (lol) and goes to the station again. Low and behold, the cops come ‘round again to see if she’s really sure she doesn’t want to go into witness protection and, now thoroughly convinced she’s surrounded by idiots, she politely says “even if I was going to burst into flames and be chewed on by Satan I would not do that shit bro, the fuck’s wrong with you?” So later she goes out to a… new age herbal store… and a woman with an Eastern European accent dressed up like a Roma traveler sells her three semi-precious stones of luck and protection- citrine, rhodonite, and a moonstone old enough and powerful enough to give her the good ol’ telepathic “fuck you”. She considers this to be the friendliest greeting a magic rock has ever given her.

As she treks back to her apartment, Nicole realizes that someone was watching her, and decides to fuck with them; she takes a cab, walks a mile, takes another cab, gets out, gets another cab, and finally goes to an all-night movie theater just to be sure. After waiting around in the bathroom to lull the watcher into a false sense of security, she exits and checks around for any persons of interest. The only people worth noting was a pair of super hot, definitely not Fenerec, brothers who walk out of the men’s room as she exits the women’s. Because literary irony is always the right way to hint at someone being super important instead of just, you know… introducing them so we can get some real and interesting character interactions.

When she finally makes it back to her apartment, she finds one the dogs (lol), Rocky, is waiting outside for her. Her agent “lost” them. So after spending the entire night trying to find the second dog (lol), Silver, they go back and have a nice five minutes of sleep before bullshit plot convenience rolls around for another protagonist potshot. And who would’ve guessed it, Nicole decides that the dogs (lol) can’t just shit in her bathroom like people, so she walks with them to a nearby dog park. She uses her magic to open the locked gate and as the dogs (lol) go scampering around the totally empty park some guys appear behind Nicole, taze the shit out of her, and tosses her into a waiting vehicle after shooting at the dogs (lol). Oh, and just in case you were wondering, that thing with the falling set pieces at the studio, it has no bearing in the rest of the story and was, despite the fact they mentioned someone tampered with the electronics, a totally random event.

So Nicole gets tossed into this car and they start driving her off towards Vegas for some reason (it’s never explained why). After a rousing game of one of her kidnappers groping her and getting shot and thrown in the trunk as punishment (he was fine after a few minutes), an oncoming car swerves out of nowhere and causes the kidnapper behind the wheel to flip the car trying to get out of the way. It’s then that we get to see Nicole have a full-blown panic attack as she is trapped in the vehicle and fucks up her hand repeatedly smashing the window to get out. Once she escapes, the kidnappers grab her and pretend like she’s the leader’s girlfriend to move suspicion away from them as they talk to the guys from the other car. And guess what? It’s those super attractive guys from the movie theater the night before, and they are reeeeaaaally insistent on waiting to for the tow-truck with Nicole and her captors. So the leader of the Brady bunch goes to pull out a gun when Nicole flips her shit and goes for a mad scramble for the weapon. Upon her success she aims for the leader’s head and “abducts” the hot guys, and takes them and their sports-car to Vegas to stay at their penthouse sweet in the Venetian. Since hot boys with lots of money apparently aren’t super great with subtlety, Nicole tricks them into admitting that they were following her and they reveal that they are Fenerec from Canada who are helping her because she looks like someone else. This someone else is her twin sister, Lisa. Shocker.

It seems that Lisa works as an Inquisition wolf and acts as an investigator and executioner for them. Surprisingly, this means that lots of people don’t like her and given that Nicole is pretty much close enough to be mistaken as her, people that don’t like Lisa might just take it out on Nicole without even realizing that they are even related. Also Lisa has been missing for months and everyone’s got the plague. So Nicole is all like “my families wolves and you saved me from kidnappers and you’re wolves so I guess if I can save y’all with my OP wizard powers I will.” Nicole tells the two hotties (their names are Richard and Alex, Dick’s the alpha and Alex is his brother) that she needs them to grab her wizard shit from her apartment and they tell her she has to call her dad.

So Mr. Desmond (henceforth Big Daddy D) has a rousing chat with Nicole about “WHERE HAVE BEEN FOR FIVE YEARS- hey dad I kidnapped some Fenerec what’s up with the plag- FIVE. YEARS. -C’MON DAD, PLAAAAAAGUE” and it is found that only one person has ever cured the plague, they were called the Winter Wolf and they disappeared over a hundred years ago so nobody knows how they did it. Nice work immortal werewolves, you had one job. So from this we learned basically nothing except that the plague should have a cure, and that Big Daddy D is 300 years old, for some reason.

After their nice conversation, a witch friend who works for Ricky and Alex shows up and BAM it’s Laura (remember her?)! Turns out Laura’s name is Amber and she works for the Inquisition, but that’s fine because they pay her an obscene amount of hush money so she doesn’t blab about Nicole being a wizard. Amber and Nicole have a heart to heart about magic and then Amber kidnaps her for three days to teach her how to use guns at the nearby Inquisition gun range, using the excuse of “she’s a normal who looks like Lisa Desmond and we want to keep her safe.” So after three days of non-stop gun training, they hand Nicole a berretta and a carry license and say “go help us catch a magic rapist and serial killer running around Vegas.” Nicole says okay and the intrepid duo go and make some magic rocks. Nicole puts enchantments on the citrine and rhodonite to taze the shit out of the killer, and then have a heart to heart with the moonstone, which agrees to the enchantment so long as it can blast the killer into oblivion.

The girls get gussied up for a night on the town and it’s about five minutes of shopping before they meet the guy. After they agree to hang with him for a while, the magic talking book (remember them?) tells Nicole that he’s a sorcerer and is eating Amber’s will to resist him through touch. So Nicole lures him up to their suite by virtue of Amber being magically ruffied and then interrogates him. He squeals that he was hired to gather power from fucking people up for someone in L.A. and he was raping and killing wealthy women specifically because he liked it. The moonstone says that’s all it needed to hear, and drains Nicole of all her magic to turn the sorcerer into a fine layer of ash coating the floor.

The two Fenerec show up and get pissed that they put themselves in danger like that, before deciding to head back to L.A.. Once back in L.A. Amber brings Nicole to get samples of some diseases that infect Fenerec once they get the plague, and also a sample of the plague itself. So they try teaching Nicole how to sense the plague in order to teach a disease that follows the plague to kill it. This does not work at all, and they call in Big Daddy D to study his immunity as a true born Fenerec instead. While Amber goes to pick Big Daddy D up from the airport, Nicole has to meet up with Dominic to talk about the contract from that movie from way back.

So at Dominic’s house, Nicole meets Dominic’s friend Patrick, who creeps on her hardcore and his touch makes her skin crawl. Dominic asks Nicole and Patrick’s help in finding a prop gun for Nicole to practice with for the movie, which is weird since the director insisted on her holding a real rifle but whatever. So after exploring the basement, Nicole find a door to another room, and inside is OH SHIT! IT’S A FENEREC BOIS! So Nicole is like “wtf?!” and Dominic is like “Patrick get her” and Patrick is all like “ima sorcerer guys!” and everyone comes to a standstill in front of the cage. Nicole gets the feeling this female wolf is not actually Dominic’s lover as he claims, and slams open the cage.

Now, here’s the lowdown on the situation. This wolf is a woman Dominic stuck in his basement until she agreed to be his lover, she was infected with the plague and to save herself, decided to stay in wolf form so the need to shift wouldn’t explode her. Dominic, seeing that she was still dying anyways, hired a bunch of sorcerers to gather power and perform a ritual to swap Nicole and the woman’s souls, leaving Nicole a dying werewolf and the woman free to be his... whether she wanted to be or not.

So the wolf bursts from the cage and seeing that Patrick has started the ritual, decides to kill Nicole so it can’t be completed, she fails, Patrick succeeds, and Nicole wakes up sometime later in the wolf’s body, alone. Nicole finds out two interesting points, one: she is immune to the silver lining of the cage, and two: her wizard powers now manifest as ice and snow instead to invisible energy. So she opens the lock with her magic and heads upstairs to find her stuff. Luckily nobody was watching it and she grabs her gun, the magic book, and the moonstone. The gun in its holster goes around her neck like a collar, and the moonstone decides that it likes her now that she’s a Fenerec. The book says “freeee” as soon as she touches it and crumbles to dust, and now instead of the book talking in her head there is a wolf spirit… somehow...?

So Nicole circles the outside of the building and realizes she’s dying of plague, so the moonstone is like “naw girl you got dis” and teaches her how to kill the plague, since being a Fenerec wizard give a +∞ modifier to the Diplomacy check to change the moonstone from “Hostile” to “Helpful.” And then Nicole whips out her gun using magic and shoots Dominic and Patrick dead through a window. Good climax author, real suspenseful. So it turns out that when Amber and Big Daddy D showed up and couldn’t get in they called the cops, and the gunshots from Nicole killing the two villains gave them probable cause to enter, they see Nicole in wolf form whining and putting on a pitiful puppy act. They bring her outside and leave her with Alex, who is dying of the plague, and Richard – who is immune btw – goes in to look for Nicole (dropped the ball there dickhead). Nicole cures Alex of the plague and they go in to find that – surprise – the woman who swapped bodies with Nicole is actually her sister Lisa!

So here we find out some stupid outta nowhere bullshit. Nicole is a true born Fenerec, but her twin Lisa was not. This meant that the two would have to be separated or Nicole would try to turn Lisa, killing her. However, Nicole would freak out if they were separated so her parents chose to use forbidden witch magic to kill Nicole’s wolf spirit. Rendering Nicole human. Also, Nicole and Lisa visited Richard and Alex’s pack a few years ago; Lisa and Alex fell in love, got married, became Fenerec, and tried to get Nicole to become one as well. Three problems though, Nicole did not want to be a Fenerec, Nicole and Richard apparently hated each other, and also Nicole was already a Fenerec so the ritual just could not work in the first place. So some pack-members got it into their heads that she was a racist and that their alpha hated her, and took it into their own hands to “deal with the problem.” Needless to say, Nicole got super fucked up, stole Richard’s car, and got in an accident so bad she was covered in scars and was in a coma for over a year. When she woke up, she tried to make a career out of singing when she met the book and lost her voice. So I guess the book was actually her wolf spirit and when she got a wolf body the two could become one again… or something?

Anyways, everybody goes home after falsifying some evidence and they decide that what just happened to Nicole was super damaging and trying to force her to turn back now what probably fatal. So the next day Amber and Nicole head to a Nuclear power plant and Nicole siphons a metric fuck-ton of power from it to cause an enormous snowstorm that carried her power to kill the plague, and unleashed it on the city to save all the Fenerec that lived there. Yay.

But the two are trapped in Amber’s car during the blizzard, so they get Nicole to become human shaped again and Amber hands her a bunch of records that reveals something kinda important I guess: Richard and Nicole had everyone fooled and they got Nicole’s mom to forge her father’s consent and got married and were all in love and shit, unfortunately the incident that left Nicole in a coma involved severe cranial trauma so she forgot basically all of that. Nice.

Once the blizzard let’s up, Nicole meets up with Richard and reveals what she now knows, retrieving their marriage rings and being all-like “werewolf healing is helping me get my memory back so let’s figure out how to restart this whole relationship thing, okay?” Aaaaaaaand that’s the end. Just right there. Kinda abrupt.

#book summary #winter wolf #witch and wolf #wizards #werewolves #rjblain

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booksummarieswithkatz · 8 years ago

Text

Inquisitor by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, first we need the basic terms for this world.

Feneric: Werewolves, they’re weak to silver and must constantly keep their animal selves under control. There are three types of Feneric separated into four social strata.

TYPES

-Born Feneric: the children who are born Feneric to Feneric parents.

-Made Feneric: Humans who became Feneric through a special ritual, this usually requires the person’s consent but it can be forced upon them.

-True Feneric: Feneric born under one of two circumstances- a human baby born to wolves, or a wolf pup born to human parents- they are extremely rare, valuable, and powerful Feneric

STRATA

-Alphas: Protectors of the pack, they are the strongest and most dominant in their packs.

-Dominants: Feneric that have instincts pushing them to take control of their surroundings and protect those they see as reliant on them.

-Submissives: Feneric who do not feel the need to be in charge, they are valued in their packs because dominant wolves are soothed by their presence, since they don’t see them as rivals.

-Omegas: Feneric who do not feel the need to be in charge yet still have all the same protective instincts of dominants; they are the rarest and can play any role necessary to stabilize their pack.

Wizards: Humans who can basically break most of the laws of magic so long as they are able to afford the price. They are killed by other supernatural beings on sight.

The Shadow Pope: this person with a dumb-ass name is the head of the Inquisition, below him are the Archeons and below them are the Cardinals.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

Our main character this time around is Victoria Allison Elisabeth Mayfield Hanover, and she is old as fuck. Born in 1851 levels of old. However she is still looking romance novel levels of “oh im not that great but the boys still drool because lol self-esteem issues” because she, surprise, surprise, is both a Feneric and a witch. Now of course you can’t be immortal, attractive, and magic without some bullshit to rain on your parade, so dear Victoria (or as her current driver’s license says “Allison Ferdinan”) is also a rogue on the run after being held captive by the Inquisition and kept in a cage until they needed her to kill someone. Also, because protagonists need to be special™ she is also the Keeper of the Seasons, which is fancy talk for “I am a wolf who sometimes goes nuts and kills people who try to fuck with nature.”

Needless to say, she doesn’t like to draw attention to herself. Which is why she became one of the most powerful CEOs in the U.S. of a corporation called Marrodin Enterprises and then created the fake persona, Allison Ferdinan, who works as an accountant and travels around the country to stop herself from going stir crazy. Because becoming rich and powerful is the first step to making sure no one knows or cares about who you are. As you do.

And thus we begin with Allison (Victoria) standing in NYC’s Central Park having a chat with her client and acquaintance, Markus Dupree. You see, its Halloween and Mark needs to find a woman who (despite his handsome face and oodles of money) is willing (lol) to pretend to be his lover at a gala for the rich and powerful to impress his mother. Allison (Victoria) of course says “absolutely no-” “Pretty please I’ll owe you a favor and we’re friends and I already got us a room at the Plaza and-its-definitely-not-the-Honeymoon-suite-and-I-definitely-don’t-love-you-woudn’t-that-be-wierd-right hahahaa.” To which she says “yeah I guess.”

So after going to a jewelry store dressed like a hobo, being accused of credit card theft when she tried to buy a multi-million-dollar necklace, and scaring the shit out of the store manager because when he called the credit card company, her assistant and friend Samantha shows up to slap the manager with a stack of Benjamins. Also she bought the necklace. Allison and Samantha have a nice chat about how buying a necklace that costs more than some small country’s GDP when she’s supposed to be a middle-class accountant may have been a tactical error, to which Allison replies “fuck that I need a purse to match my dress” and they go buy a purse before taking her to the party.

Now at the party we learn a few important things, one: Mark’s mom is a witch and also a huge bitch, two: Mark’s mom works for the Inquisition and straight up kills a woman named Caroline at the party and disguises it as a Halloween murder mystery, three: the Inquisition used a Feneric as a party favor for the rich guests, and four: Allison is allergic to canines, including Feneric… and herself… yeah. All of these serve to tilt the shit out of Allison and after Mark’s mom straight up calls her a slut after Mark’s money she bolts out of there and kidnaps Samantha for a “time to disappear” roadtrip.

They drive to some woods and Allison shifts for the first time in about two decades (a really big no-no when you risk going insane by trying to not shift for one full moon) and as she forgets her humanity and runs off into the woods she kills a bunch of witches who were trying to turn Autumn into Winter early. Then after a brief encounter with an odd wolf, Samantha says Allison’s true name (Victoria Allison Elisabeth Mayfield Hanover) and gets her to change back before going on the road again.

On the road they get a call from Samantha’s boss, who says that Allison was spotted with a giant dog in front of a lawyer’s house and mauled him to death. So the “time to disappear” trip became a “time to fake our own deaths” trip and after paying a guy Allison new from when she and Samantha went on a wild bender in Saigon during the Vietnam war, Allison gets two bullets to the chest (only for the camera of course) and they blow up Samantha’s car. It’s then that Samantha takes off her soccermom illusion and reveals that she’s in her seventies. WOW! So surprising after the whole, 150+ year old wolf-witch thing right? So they drive down to Atlanta and do a big song and dance to swap Allison’s identity to that of Victoria Hanover, CEO of Marrodin Enterprises – a company so strictly controlled by her that only people who pass a harsh evaluation and can be called good people will ever be hired or promoted. She also hires Samantha (now old) to be her new secretary.

At Marrodin we meet a few important people, Elliot Anderson (CEO of a subcorporation of Marrodin and overall cool dude) and Amelia (Head of the legal divisions and former judge). So we then find out that the lawyer people thought Allison killed worked for a Marrodin law firm, and that a bunch of employees around Marrodin are getting routinely and professionally iced. So Victoria does what she does best, run out on her own and adopt some kids left behind by one of the dead employees. Then Samantha dies, and Victoria just about loses her shit. After “convincing” a doctor to do a full toxicology report on Samantha’s body, we find out that Samantha had a weird virus in her system that looked similar to ebola -er- sorry- *ehem* looked similar to ebola, and *gasp* say it ain’t so but it’s the plague! A disease that killed an assload of Feneric when Victoria was young! So Victoria calls up the guy who fake shot her and says “yo someone murdered my witch” to which he said “I know a guy, also if you dance naked on their graves when you’re done I want pictures.”

So Victoria buys a house, drives -by herself- to pick up the kids she adopted, and picks up a British hitman guy named James who decides to chill with her. Also the kids turn out to be Feneric. And they’re both omegas. And the boy (they are a brother and sister between 3 and 7y.o.) is a true born. Also it turns out that Victoria Allison Elisabeth Mayfield Hanover is actually a true born Feneric and part of the British royal family and was sold as a breeding bitch to a Feneric pack in Canada. That’s a thing. Also there is a huge bounty to capture her, because she’s ancient and magic and royal and shit.

Then Victoria becomes a cool mom and take the kids to a funeral for one of the employees in Washington D.C. and then someone lobs a bunch of grenades into the crowd and Victoria goes into a coma, and is brought to the Mayo clinic in Minnesota (land of lakes represent) where she wakes up two weeks later. After going back to Atlanta, Victoria realizes that all the dead employees are Feneric, so she looks up their bank statements and realizes that they all bought stuff at a gas station in Alabama around the time of the full moon. So she decides they were a pack and brings Elliot Anderson (remember him?) and the two kids out to the place.

We then find out that some dumb motherfucker has been going around randomly forcing people into becoming Feneric and then abandoning them without any guidance. She then decides to admit to Anderson what she is (only the wolf part though) and then they go and wolf out in the woods. Cuz werewolves. Victoria then circles back and finds SURPRISE it’s Anderson, James, Mark, and Mark’s mom having a chat in the open about killing rogue wolves. SWEEEEEERVE!

So Victoria, now real shook, jumps out of the bushes and rips Mark’s mom’s throat out. Lovely. Everyone takes this really well, and they bring her to the Inquisition’s nearby base, and get her tested for the plague, cuz she’s ancient and shit. It’s pretty clear too since modern Feneric look like modern wolves kinda but she looks like the way extinct dire wolf species. Also the boss of the place is a Feneric named Devonshire who SURPRISE is the one who keeps forcing people into becoming Feneric because he wants an alpha or some shit. The book really just nosedives from here so I’ll try to condense it further.

They lock Victoria in a room and force her to turn human again, but she actually decided “fuck all of you” and summoned a hurricane and a blizzard to simultaneously strike the Inquisition base and she starts getting hypothermia. She is then awakened by James and Mark who have very different reactions to the revelation of what she is; mainly Mark goes “I-THOUGHT-YOU-WERE-DEAD-I-LOVE-YOU” and James the Brit goes “OMGOMGOMGOMG YOU’RE THE SHIMMER! THE ROYAL WOLF! I. AM. A. HUUUUUGE FAN!” And so she says “yeah ok bye” and commands the snowstorm to toss them out of the base. Then Devonshire and Anderson burst in and Devonshire goes “shoot her” and Anderson shoots her – really shoots her this time. Then Amelia (remember her?) busts in, shoots Anderson, and grabs Victoria. Then the two of them get captured by an Arab woman and some mercs who are like “sick, kill the witch and sell the bitch, lady wolves are big business.” But when the Arab woman gets antsy about the silver chains poisoning Victoria, the other mercs kill her and then Amelia goes “take the chains off bro she’s the Shimmer bro” (also Shimmer is a name for the Keeper of the Seasons i.e. Victoria) and the mercs are like “sweet” and then Amelia says “close your eyes Victoria” and she does and then the mercs are dead and then SURPRISE BITCH it was all an illusion and Amelia is evil and the whole thing where Anderson shot Victoria was a lie and also Anderson and James show up and so does Mark and they shoot Amelia and it turns out that EVERYTHING that happened in the book was Amelia’s plan to take over Marrodin and kill Victoria because Samantha was her coven sister and Victoria corrupted her or some shit. So everyone decides to act like all of this never happened, except that Anderson and Victoria might be swiggity swooty going for each others’ booty on the down low and Victoria promised Mark that if he still wanted to marry her in ten years she would consider it and James got nothing because he is a limey bitch. Also Anderson is the Shadow Pope.

#Shadow pope #The queen bitch #Inquisitor #Shyamalan #scoobydoo surprises #rjblain

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