Phillip Marrow, Jr. The Private Eye
Phillip Marrow, Jr. The Private Eye is the first novel in its series
PHILLIP MARROW, JR. THE PRIVATE EYE
(Sample Pages)
By E.A. Bundy
Chapter One: A Visitor
Regie’s fingers rested on his laptop keyboard as he pondered the beginning of his newest novel titled Phillip Marrow, Jr. He was deciding whether he should send his teenage private eye to enter a seemingly empty house without backup. Before that choice could be made, Regie's doorbell echoed through his home, interrupting his thoughts.
“No,” he moaned, wishing whoever rang the bell would just leave. His hands poised anxiously above the computer keys. Maybe the intruder would think no one was home. It was probably just a salesman, anyway. Regie heard his mom answer the door, which was an uncommon act since she rarely came out of her room, preferring to just sit in her wheelchair.
“Oh crud,” he said, hearing female chatter that included his mother’s voice moving toward his bedroom refuge in the garage. Regie’s mom would have to stop in the family room, and he wanted only to get back to typing his story. His young detective was about to enter a building contractor’s unsold spec house, hoping to find—
Regie recognized Oracle’s voice even before she stuck her head through his doorway and said, “Are you decent?”
She invariably asked the same thing, and she always poked her head in to look before she said it. He responded with an obligatory laugh. The truth was he liked Oracle—not in the romantic sense, definitely not as a girlfriend. But he hated being interrupted when he was working on a story, especially one he enjoyed so much.
He could not believe Oracle was already home from Northeast Salem High. Regie glanced down at his watch, then up at his window. Winter’s shortened daylight was quickly waning. That’s what happened when the writing bug really hit him like it had today, immersing him in the story. Home-schooling allowed him to follow such urges.
“Well?” There was a hint of frost in that single word as Oracle peered over her half-high reading glasses and gave him the look.
Now he’d really blown it. Oracle studied French in her spare time because it was the “language of love,” and she wanted to weave a few words into her romance stories. He dutifully invited her to “Entrez-vous.”
“Merci.” She stepped up into his room.
Regie noticed she still had on her ebony-toned fake nails, and traces of black dye remained in her dishwater blonde hair. However, she’d obviously changed out of her black clothes. “Did mom see you?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
Oracle smacked her bubble gum. “She gets it that I’m not really Goth. I just like their fashion sense.”
“Keep it up,” Regie said, more irritated about the interruption than her black nails. “You know that my mom already worries you’re a Satanist.”
Oracle laughed, looking at his laptop, “Which one you working on?”
Her hands were behind her back so Regie guessed she had brought part of her own current manuscript to share with him.
“Is it ready for me to read?” she asked, still staring at his computer notebook.
That confirmed she had something she wanted him to read.
“Not yet. It’s brand new, but you can look at this one,” he nodded at his desk.
Oracle slid her sample on his laptop, whispering, “Just ten pages,” and retrieved his short story. Settling routinely on his bed, her back against the wall, she maintained her standard three-foot distance from him. It was the space his mom hadn’t rolled her eyes at when she historically stuck her head through the doorway to see if they needed anything—before her wheelchair. Surprisingly, Oracle still honored that buffer space.
“Hi, Oracle.” Stacy flounced into Regie’s private preserve without knocking. She wore socks on her feet—no shoes—obviously for sneaking up on them. There was no way he could return to typing his new blockbuster detective novel with these two present.
Stacy flopped beside Oracle.
Regie lifted Oracle’s pages off his keyboard and said to his sister, “Go torture Austin. We don’t need your help.”
“Mom says.”
He knew Stacy would go running to their mother if he pushed her to leave. “Keep quiet, then.”
“Hi, Stac,” Oracle said, already focusing on the papers in her hand.
Regie saw Stacy’s tongue dart back into her mouth. Ordinarily, she stuck her tongue out at him much longer, but she didn’t want Oracle to know how juvenile she really was.
In the same sickeningly sweet voice Stacy always used to get whatever she wanted, she begged Oracle, “Read out loud so I can hear.”
“You hate my stuff,” Regie said.
“Not today.”
“All you ever read is Dim-light,” he told her. Secretly, he suspicioned she represented a certain weird demographic to which his work might accidentally appeal.
As Oracle’s voice pronounced the first words of his short story, Regie succumbed to the inevitable, letting his eyes shift across the room, forgetting her pages, and listening to the tale he had completed over the weekend. He hated to admit this was a narrative greatly influenced by Oracle’s thirst for the teen romance genre. However, it also had his satirical humor, and stylized twists. Now he would get to see a female audience’s response to it, but heaven help him if his mother overheard.
He wondered with regret when he could return to Phillip Marrow. His protagonist was about to get himself into really big trouble—with a lot of help from Regie.
Chapter Two: Regie’s Short Story
Oracle’s practiced theatrical voice animated Regie’s printed pages:
The Great Christmas Caper
By Regie Ralston
Andre had no idea when his jet landed at the Portland International Airport on the day after Christmas about the dangers and intrigue he would face before he returned home. But for him, that was no big deal—all in a day’s work so to speak.
When a foxy dame about his age gave him the eye on his way through the airport, he didn’t have time for broads right then, so he smoothly returned a flashy smile and kept right on walking. He was in a hurry to meet with his sister-in-law, Noël, for the start of his skiing vacation. Partly, his self-assurance came from being the youngest private investigator in the greater San Diego area, but most people who knew him just called Andre—P.I., Junior.
Of course, as a gumshoe, he wasn’t old enough to carry a pistol, but that was no problem at all. He smiled whenever he thought about it, because his Kung-fu master avowed that Andre was already a lethal weapon. There were great advantages to being youthful in his profession. He could go places a regular P.I. would never fit in, like skate parks and public schools, or the back seats of sub-compact cars. In fact, as a free agent, he was in high demand by all the southern California P.I. companies.
This holiday season was his chance to get away from it all—from things like private snooper work, and the daily grind of school life—or so he thought. But when you’ve honed yourself into a modern tool of investigation and suspect-tailing, as Andre had done, you can’t really leave it all behind. As it turned out, that was a good thing.
His brother, Jonathan, was older, but they still had lots in common, like playing video games, going skiing and snowboarding—the usual kinds of things. Even more importantly, they were in similar professions—they were both “snoops.” Jonathan was a security supervisor for the biggest and best casino in the northwest, so he had to stay on top of his “game.” And that connection became crucial for Andre in preventing one of the biggest heists of his career. (Just so you know, no matter what anyone says, Andre didn’t do the thieving, it was the lousy, dirty-rotten crime lovers, but more on that later.)
Jonathan and Andre left the house in Dallas, Oregon early on Sunday morning for a fun-filled day on the slopes. (Yes, Oregon has a city called Dallas, not to be confused with another city by a similar name in the Lone Star State.) Noël wasn’t feeling too perky and stayed home with her little daughter, Jayden—who was nearly a year old and cute as a cuddly, stuffed animal, plus already smart as a video game designer.
The Chancerious brothers made good driving time, not encountering snow on the road until they neared the mountain. Their destination was Mount Hood Meadows, a great place to go skiing, snow boarding, or even cross-country skiing. (I don’t get the tiniest kickback for mentioning all that.) But, in truthfulness, Andre mostly preferred skijoring, which, as we all should know, is the sport where a skier is towed across a frozen surface by a horse, or, heaven forbid, a snowmobile. But they couldn’t find such an opportunity on Mount Hood for that day.
Andre decided he would focus on snowboarding, and went out on the slopes where fresh powder had dropped just the night before. He suddenly had the feeling he was being watched. With some people, that sense is occasionally acute. For Andre, it was always foolproof—like the slide action on an old army issue, forty-five caliber, semi-automatic sidearm—it just never failed him.
Most people who sense they are under surveillance make the big mistake of looking around to spot the culprit. Not Andre. Cool as a thug’s brass knuckles on a January day in Montana (they reportedly have at least two thugs up there) Andre continued snowboarding like nothing unusual was going on. He just maintained his normal routine, putting the board through its paces like an old-time decoy in a con-game run by an organized crime ring−it was just that sweet. He’d completed a second loop-the-loop off a snow ramp and managed to nonchalantly video the entire slope above him while he was upside down. He completed that little number utilizing the newest, miniaturized, high-resolution button cam, because he’d attached it to his stocking cap as a routine precaution. For Andre it was customary, like using a backup man when you go into a fortified building after the bad guys—you just never know when you’ll need one.
His backpack contained, among other essential items, the special spies-only laptop with the latest surveillance software package, courtesy of the biggest P.I. agency in L.A.: Beverly Brothers, LLC. Yeah, they occasionally flew him up there when they got stumped on a big case. Of course, with his six-figure income, he could have bought one for himself, (the laptop and a carrying case) but what the heck.
The image Andre sought soon popped-up inside his snow goggles. He eye-blinked that he wanted a close-up of the broad with blonde hair, and in a millisecond, there she was. A lesser detective would have done a double take when they realized this Blondie shooting a picture of Andre was the same skirt who’d come onto him at the airport. Small world. Well, it really was since the space age, but a good P.I. didn’t believe in coincidences. That babe was up to something, and what’s more, Andre was bound and determined to find out just what the something was that she was up to.
Andre took a little break a while later, ostensibly to catch his breath, but mainly to give the local yokels a chance to practice a few of his easiest moves. That blonde babe came out of nowhere−kamikaze style−like some total klutz on two sticks masquerading as skis, and broadsided the poor guy. Of course—as you probably already know—he’d planned it that way to make their meeting seem more natural and innocent-like. During their thrashing around in the snow he got to really know her, what with all the commingling of arms and legs—plus he got to try out some of his best P.I. expletives deleted, and those words were the vintage stuff that he never used at home.
Of course, one of the things they exchanged, besides curses—and we’re not talking about bodily fluids here so get your mind out of the gutter—was cell phone numbers, and that was a key move on his part for his whole plan to work. She was a typical dame, and denied winking at him in the airport—sheesh, broads. She even pretended they were total strangers, and when she started screaming lawsuit and yelling for her old man, Andre began to wonder if she was another fem fatale, like the famed female spy Mata Hari.
Later, when they hooked-up over in the main lodge, he thought she was taking the whole thing too far when she showed up with crutches and all that purple and black eye shadow to make it look like she had a shiner—gees what a kidder. He called her on the cell phone while she was trying to hobble away, and in attempting to tap her BlackBerry, she somehow got tangled with her crutches, ending in a screaming heap on the floor. He managed to drag her over to a corner away from prying eyes, where she lay in a whimpering mass. She deserved a Golden Globe if not an Oscar for the way she pretended to be afraid of him, and maybe even a Grammy for some of those high notes.
After that, she just clung to him, breathing heavily, and that’s when he slipped the previously written note into her pocket. By the way, it was in that same pocket where he found her room key from Timberline Lodge. Now, who goes skiing at Mount Hood Meadows and sleeps in Timberline Lodge? I ask you--
While Trixie—that turned out to be the broad’s real name—pretended to need a medic, Andre decided to ski on around to Timberline Lodge and check out her room. It was a longer ways than he’d anticipated and if he wasn’t a world class skier, he’d never have made it there and back in the time he’d allotted.
When Andre returned, he found Trixie asleep on a cot—more likely, she was feigning slumber. He held up the plastic trash bag salvaged from her room, filled with priceless jewelry—also from her room—and said, “Say, Sister, where’d you get this stuff?”
She pretended to awaken and be speechless, but it was no use. He didn’t have to resort to strong-arm tactics because in just a few minutes he had that dame singing like a canary. It was actually a pathetic whistling sound, as if she was almost totally out of breath. Just then, like one of those real-live, deep mine canaries, she pretended to pass out from lack of oxygen. He was onto her game, though, and knew it was just a feminine ploy to get him to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But, when he was on a case, he didn’t mix business with pleasure, and besides, there’d be plenty of time for that later when she got out of the slammer on parole.
As it turned out, she had really good connections in the law enforcement world, indicating her accomplices were high-class thieves. Luckily for Andre—since he was so far out of his home territory—his brother Jonathan pulled a few strings. When the dust settled, neither Andre nor the totally awesome babe ended up in the clinker. The authorities impounded the jewels and, as the saying goes, everybody lived happily ever after. But for Andre, it was all in a day’s work as a junior private investigator.
So ended one of the most involved cases of Andre’s young career, the one that became known as The Great Holiday Caper.
Plus, there was the fact that he still had her phone number—and he wouldn‘t have to wait for her to get out of prison. He could call her right away.
Sweet!
Chapter Three: A Wrinkle Out of Time
Oracle looked up when she’d finished reading, and stared at Regie. He felt discomforted by her intensity and glanced away.
She finally asked, “Want to go to the dance on Friday? We could take the bus over to Northeast, or my mom could drive us.”
What had gotten into her? Regie looked at his sister. She stared open-mouthed—waiting to see how he’d reply.
“Uh….” Regie wasn’t supposed to date until he was sixteen, although that birthday was getting uncomfortably close. Would his mother allow him a couple of months’ leeway? No. Restrictions had increased way more after her auto accident. She worried that she was being punished for something, but she did not know what. Consequently, she tried to control everything in her children’s lives as well as her own.
“Just kidding,” Oracle said, looking back down at his short story. “This is different from what you usually write. I like it a lot.”
Regie glanced at his sister, and saw the thought patterns of her mind revealed on her face. He believed part of her was disappointed because he hadn’t said, “Yes, I’ll go to the dance,” which could potentially make it easier for Stacy to start dating before she was sixteen. She’d already told Regie she was old enough to “go out” even though she was only thirteen.
One other complicating factor to Oracle’s invitation was that Regie did not know how to dance. As if the two girls knew what he was thinking, they leaped off the bed and cavorted around the room like they were on a dance floor, each singing different songs.
Regie tried to concentrate on the pages Oracle had brought him to read. However, descriptive terms like “demanding lips” and “dueling tongues” jumped out at him and he looked up to see if the girls had noticed his face turning red. They were gyrating around each other, bodies swaying to the separate tunes they sang, which was actually a relief for Regie at that moment.
Austin’s head appeared in the doorway. “Mom wants to know what’s going on in here.”
The girls froze in place. “Nothing,” answered Stacy.
“Right,” said Austin.
Regie’s obnoxious twelve-year-old brother couldn’t be bothered answering the front door, but he had time to spy on Regie and his friends. Austin turned to go and report to their mother, but Oracle said, “Danny wants to know if you’re coming over later.”
“Probably.”
“He wants you to bring your newest…let’s see…what’s it called? Something like Game-Former Magazine.”
Austin had again turned to leave. “Informer…yeah, okay.”
“And something else, but I can’t remember…” Oracle looked as if she was deep in thought. She was, after all, a great actress. That was one of the reasons Stacy looked up to her and the main rationale why their mother tolerated Regie having her for a friend even though she was a potentially corrupting influence and came over much too often.
“Later—” Austin called from the family room as he raced away before Oracle could stall him any longer.
“Now we can read your pages,” Stacy said to Oracle, who looked stunned by the prospect of reading her “edgy” manuscript aloud in front of Regie’s sister.
“Good idea,” Regie said, happy to divert attention from the dance invitation. He lifted the ten-page sample and held it out for Oracle.
She grabbed and folded it in half, tucking her work beneath the piece she’d just read. “Maybe later. First, we have to discuss Regie’s short story and find out more about the new one he’s working on.”
That reminded Regie what he’d been doing before, and he wished he was still typing on his recently begun novel. He had a surprise in store for Phillip Marrow, Jr.
Right now, however, he needed the two girls to lose interest in it. He said, “This one’s really different.” Glancing down at the monitor—knowing all his work was strongly influenced by the detective stories of the 1920s and 30s, up through the 1960s—Regie thought the girls would not like his novel.
To be safe, if he was forced to, he’d tell them something so outrageous they’d drop the topic and move on to other interests. He didn’t like sharing his rough drafts with anyone—maybe in a couple weeks or so, after he’d had time to revise it.
“It’s just another private eye story,” he said, “with a teenage boy investigator as the protagonist…” he looked up and noticed they were still interested. In desperation, he added, “Except this one also has a vampire and a werewolf in it.” He figured that ought to squelch their curiosity because of co-mingling two such different genres.
He was wrong.
Both girls leaned forward as if he’d just offered them giant chocolate bars. He half expected to see them lick their lips, if not actually drool.
Stacy’s voice was shriller than usual, “Really?”
“Does he know from the start?” asked Oracle. “I mean…does he know what they are…? Or is that what he finds out during his investigation?”
Regie cleared his throat. This was unexpected and a major complication. Now he had to come up with details, but he hadn’t thought any of this through. “Uh…”
“Is this going to be like Dim-light?” Stacy asked, seemingly out of breath.
“Not really….” He struggled to invent something—anything at all that could dissuade them. “The vampire in my story is a girl.” He thought that would cool things down for a while, since it was not a hot guy vampire they should lose interest altogether.
"What about the werewolf?” Oracle said. “Is that a girl, too?”
Regie replied, “Yeah,” before he had actually thought about it.
“Read some to us,” Stacy demanded.
“It’s not ready. Mostly, it’s just ideas at this point. I haven’t gotten to the part where he finds out these two girls he likes are really—”
“Vampires!” Stacy shouted.
“One’s a werewolf,” Oracle corrected, and asked Regie, “He likes them?” The interest conveyed in her tone seemed out of proportion to what Regie thought the story warranted, if he’d actually had a story like that.
She stared so hard at him that he took a big gulp—but we are not talking about a soft drink here. Regie busied himself in cautiously adding to the title of his Phillip Marrow, Jr. story.
“Please read it,” Stacy begged with the voice that always got her what she wanted. “We won’t say a word…won’t interrupt at all…no matter what.”
Oracle pulled the laptop away from Regie before he could protest, and handed it off to Stacy, who began to read:
Phillip Marrow, Jr.—The Case of the Missing Vampire
By Regie Ralston
Chapter One
“Wait…” Stacy interrupted herself. “That should read, The Case of the Kissing Vampire.”
“Right,” Regie agreed, thinking it was good he’d at least added a vampire to the title a moment before. “There are lots of typos, and I already said it’s not ready for anybody to read—yet—in a couple days, maybe…?
To his amazement, Stacy leaned all the way over and handed the laptop back to him. More surprisingly, Oracle did not try to stop her. “In two days,” said Stacy, “we’ll get to read at least the first chapter, and we won’t bug you about it before then.” She hopped off the bed and called back as she exited his room, “Come on Oracle…let him write.”
Just as astounding, Oracle stood up and followed her, leaving Regie alone on the bed. He sat in growing silence. What had just happened?
Absently, he changed the first letter of the word Missing so that it became Kissing. He had a lot of rewriting to do. Maybe he’d have to start over.
Chapter Four: Two Days Later
Regie was nervous. He always felt apprehensive when another person first read his newest manuscript. On this occasion, however, that prospect was fraught with even more hazard. He’d been writing way out of his comfort zone for two whole days. How had he gotten himself into this mess? He hated to admit it, but never before had anyone been really excited about one of his story ideas. That was especially true of Stacy. The funny thing was, he didn’t want to disappoint her—and before, he could have cared less. His previous attitude was always so what if she didn’t like detective stories?
Regie heard the two girls’ footsteps in the family room and the sound of their approach slowed, changing noticeably as they entered the area of the converted double garage. What he did not hear was laughter…no giggling. Not even their typical banter.
Out of nervousness, he called to them, louder than he intended, “Entrez-vous. I’m decent.”
Even that did not elicit a joking response. The girls carefully stepped up into his bedroom and sat beside him as though they had entered some hallowed place. They stared expectantly at the young author, until Stacy finally demanded, “Well…?”
In that moment, Regie knew he could not read it to them, and handed his laptop to Oracle. She immediately began the story aloud—her spoken words clearly projecting the scene he had depicted in prose:
Phillip Marrow, Jr.–In The Case of the Kissing Vampire
By Regie Ralston
Chapter One
At first, it seemed as though I was on just another typical case. I was a Private Investigator—P.I. for short. My professional name, the one my employers knew me by, was Phillip Marrow, Jr. I had already checked out the exterior of what was supposed to be an empty house before entering the premises.
Once inside, however, I discovered it was not vacant. I was on the second floor and heavy breathing came from the next room. My hearing was so acute I could have detected it even if the door was closed—which it wasn’t. Taking up my Kung-fu stance as a precaution, I edged forward. If I’d known what I was getting into when entering this supposedly deserted dwelling, I would have called for back-up. Too late now.
I peered through the foot-wide opening of the door into the adjoining chamber. It was dark as the inside of a murdered flatfoot’s coffin—six feet underground.
The breathing was more pronounced now, and labored—theirs, not mine. That heavy respiration was accompanied by an occasional whimper, but I dared not focus on what I feared was occurring. I only dealt in facts and I had to keep my wits about me or someone would surely die. It would partially ruin my day if that someone was me.
No time to carefully push the door open, chancing a telltale squeak. I slid sideways through the entrance and took up my defensive posture once more.
A groaning sound punctuated the heavy breathing. I likewise heard the rubbing of bare skin against the carpeted floor—not the soft whisper of clothing I’d expected. The presumed nakedness told me I must act immediately. Many years of Crimson Tiger Tae Kwon Do training came into play. I crouched—then launched like a fearsome jungle cat. A terrible martial arts roar erupted from my vocal cords, creating the shock and awe affect only an adept of my skill could deliver in such a circumstance.
Flying through the air, my mind raced, compiling the details registered by my senses, allowing the instant formation of each move and counter-move I must execute. My keen hearing allowed me to pounce on my adversary with absolute precision and timing. As predicted, the enemy remained hunched-over someone. Even though my foe was smaller than first indicated, I adapted flawlessly, tucking my knees lower, locking them in place behind the other’s partially folded legs. My momentum did all the work.
In one of my many masterful combat moves, my arms circled the adversary’s upper body, and the total force of my impact carried the fiend into an overhead sideways roll. I turned, flipping him, pulling the assailant into a circular movement above me.
I planned on flinging the fellow into the nearby wall. As luck would have it, the wily adversary was so slight of build that my grip was not sustainable. The goon slid loose from what was otherwise a perfect hold. His impact against the wall was less powerful than anticipated, probably due to his tinier than predicted frame.
In fact, impossible as it seemed, the other must have turned in the air and encountered the wall in a controlled fashion. Then recoiled, landing across the chamber, alighting so softly as to be almost undetectable even by my super-hearing.
Just as I took up my defensive pose again, I perceived a faint thump on the wall to my left, but as I turned in that direction, I felt a steel grip about my waist, and then I went flying through the air. Only my fantastic instinct and training saved me, as I somehow turned in time to prevent myself from being flattened against the same wall I’d flung my opponent into. This enemy shyster was no slouch!
After picking myself up off the plush surface, I regained my stance, keeping lower than before. The only heavy breathing I noticed was my own and I made a mental note that I’d have to start working-out more. In the meantime, I needed to remain calm so that when I next tangled with this goon, I did not summarily destroy him. After all, there was important information to be gathered.
I took a step rearward, intending to place my back against the wall so my adversary could not get behind me. It was too late. Sinewy arms encircled me from behind, locking my straining biceps against my chest. The fellow’s powerful legs wrapped securely around my thighs, rendering me immobile.
My challenger whispered one word into the darkness. “Truce?”
I, Phillip Marrow, Jr., had never conceived of such an eventuality and refused to entertain that notion. Something stirred deep within me and in a final desperate act I called forth every ounce of strength, strained every fiber of muscle, and yet I still remained immobile. This simply could not be.
Hushed words hung in the air. Were they an implausible answer to my thought?
“Yes,” he whispered, “it really could be…in fact, IT IS. Do you give up?”
Then I was free—physically liberated. Yet I was in such mental turmoil as to still feel like a semi-captive. Was this how the beastly villain had contained his other victim, doing heaven only knew what to him or her in the middle of the floor?
My vile foe was suddenly in front, his soft breathing barely detectable against my face, while diminutive fingers encircled my right hand, guiding it up to the other’s bare shoulder. With my palm touching the taut skin over my opponent’s collarbone, it seemed the intent was for me to use my fingers to learn about the adversary. In less than a minute, my private investigator’s mind deduced a great deal. By sliding my hand this way and that, upwards and downwards, I—oops—!
"Sorry,” I croaked, nonplussed, knowing that if the room had been lighted, a massive blush would now form a crimson banner along my neck and face. Impossible as it seemed, my antagonist was female—clothed in nothing but a skimpy bikini.
Thus distracted, my hand continued upward of its own volition to her face, registered smooth skin, brushed lightly against long hair. She held my hand briefly against her cheek, then kissed my knuckles ever so softly with her searching lips.
After she released my fingers, her face brushed against my neck, and she sniffed along my skin, causing me to quiver. Likewise, I felt her trembling…then she withdrew.
In another moment, I noticed a qualitative change in the silent room--
She was gone.
“Wait…” but my summons went unanswered.
* * *
After Oracle finished reading, her eyes clung to the last page on the notebook’s screen for a full minute, and then fastened on Regie’s with an indecipherable stare. He glanced at his sister, who gazed fixedly back at him. The suspense was deadly, and he asked, “What do you think?”
Stacy said, “When do we get to meet the werewolf?”
“And,” Oracle added, “when does he really kiss the vampire?”
Website copyright © 2011-2013 by EA Bundy. All rights reserved. None of the text, photographs, or illustrations may be used without the author or publisher’s—Singing Winds Press—written permission. (Please note, Singing Winds Press is closed to submissions.)