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  Strange Days

  Rebecca Royce

  Book one of the Shadow Promised series.

  Dodie Chase has a terrible crush on her neighbour, Christian Casillo. But a man like him—karate blackbelt, exotic dancer and romance novel cover stud—could never be interested in a mouse like her.

  And thoughts of romance fly out of her head when her best friend’s boyfriend is brutally murdered, leaving Mindy white-haired and in shock. An evil clown, a creature from Dodie’s worst nightmares, is pursuing everyone she loves—and she starts to realize that Christian is among them.

  A Romantica® horror erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave

  Strange Days

  Rebecca Royce

  Chapter One

  Dodie Chase held her car keys between her teeth while she tried to balance her morning coffee, her apartment keys and her briefcase without spilling, breaking or destroying anything. She shook her head. There had to be an easier way to begin her daily routine than this.

  “Here. Let me help you.”

  She cringed at the voice behind her and subsequently dumped her coffee all over her white blouse. Closing her eyes, she wondered if it would look really bad if she started banging her head against her apartment door. The heat from the coffee seeped through her shirt, scalding her skin. She hissed, backing up a step while she pulled on the material, this time colliding with her neighbor.

  Making a sound somewhere between “oomph” and “whoops”, she stumbled before he caught her and hauled her back to her feet.

  “Wow. Did you burn yourself? I hope this isn’t my fault. Did I startle you? I really only wanted to help.”

  Dodie raised her eyes to meet the concerned gaze of the one man in the world who seemed to startle her simply by existing. Christian Casillo, her next-door neighbor and god to women everywhere, smiled at her while he held her body against his.

  She swallowed, her throat gone dry from his touch. “I’m fine. Thank you. Just clumsy.”

  Dodie pushed herself backward out of his arms and decided not to analyze why the sudden downward slope of his blond eyebrows made her stomach flutter. She’d spent more than enough time thinking about the man next door. Adding even one more second of time to the activity would change her from being fascinated with him to being obsessed.

  Dodie Chase did not obsess. Not about men she would never have one sliver of a chance with.

  He asked her the same question again. “Dorothy, are you okay? Did you burn yourself?”

  “Dodie.” She cleared her throat. “Everyone calls me Dodie.” Since this was the most they had ever communicated in the hallway, he would have no way of knowing that. Turning on her heel, she held her head high as she walked past him. “I’m perfectly fine. Thanks.”

  She had no time to go back in her apartment and change, and who knew whether he’d still be out here when she got finished. Dodie had to get out of the building. Immediately if not sooner. Without another word, she fled the hallway for the elevator, hoping she never, ever had to be that close to him again.

  Really, it was unfair to other men that people like Christian existed. Tall and broad-shouldered, with blond hair that fell to his shoulders. As far as she could tell from the quasi-stalking she had done of him, which had basically meant asking anyone she could think of in the building discreet questions about him, he spent his days in the gym or working out at various fitness places around town. Austin had its pick of athletic offerings. He needed only to step outside to find three or four places offering to teach karate, pilates or something called the Barre Method.

  More than once, on her way home, she’d spotted him in a black belt at the karate studio, looking very ninja-esque. She pushed away the memory, since it also featured her face pressed against the glass to stare at him. Really, she was bordering on pathetic.

  A man like him would never consider dating someone like her. Particularly because, in addition to the exercise and occasional posing he did for romance novel cover shoots, his evenings were spent dancing at Austin’s most hard-to-get-into male strip club, Brass. By contrast, she sat with coffee on her shirt and her hair uncombed at a desk with no idea what clothes were fashionable or even where she could buy yoga pants should she want to go to the gym. She knew firsthand how beautiful he looked on stage. At Brass, Christian and fifteen other men showed patrons just what sheer male perfection looked like while it wriggled across the floor in a seductive dance.

  Dodie had watched it herself when she’d gone to see him work, hidden at the back of the room.

  Men like Christian Casillo didn’t look twice at women like Dodie Chase. Not when she preferred to spend her nights online in roleplaying rooms or going out with friends to listen to obscure bands play funky jazz music. He would find her dull, so she didn’t even know why she bothered thinking about him at all.

  Enough. Done. Dumb. Her shirt was soaked. The guys at work would give her hell about it all day.

  Sighing, she stepped out of the elevator. Some days were just like this. They started out strange and they only got worse. Maybe she could cut this one off at the pass. The oddness could be attributed to her run-in with Christian and she could leave it at that.

  * * * * *

  Later that morning, as she stared at code wondering whether she was going to have to have to call one of the tech guys over to help her, she looked up to find her best friend Mindy looking down at her.

  Mindy leaned against Dodie’s cubicle wall, a smile on her lips. “Nice of you to notice I’m here.”

  “You know how I get when something isn’t working? Today, nothing is working.” She leaned back in her chair, strain in her neck making her grit her teeth. “What’s going on?”

  It was past lunchtime and Mindy, one of the salespeople for their small company, didn’t usually take breaks in the middle of the day.

  “Have you been following the weirdness on the news today?”

  “No. I’ve been totally preoccupied figuring out why I can’t get the hero of this game to turn his head left in this scene instead of right. It just won’t do it.” She broke the pencil she was holding in her left hand. It snapped right in two. Blinking at the mess she’d made, she set the two pieces down in front of her. “What’s going on?”

  “Just a lot of weirdness around town. People are reporting seeing things and some spree of murders happened in an office building on Lamar.”

  “Really?” She clicked over on her desktop to check the Twitter feed she left running all day. Sure enough, local Austinites were speculating about objects in the skies, calling it some kind of secret government project run amok. As for the murder spree, she winced when she read the details.

  Those poor people. All gutted. Silently, she sent good energy to their families to help them to get through such a tragic time.

  “Thanks for letting me know. I’ve been a little out of it.”

  Mindy shrugged. “That’s okay. I just can’t concentrate today. I have a billion phone calls I could return but I can’t seem to do anything constructive. Austin doesn’t have this kind of crime. We just don’t.”

  Dodie smiled at her friend. She could really use a break and it certainly looked as if Mindy could too. “Let’s go get some coffee.”

  One of the benefits of having an office so close to South Congress was the ability to pop into the South Congress Street Café whenever she wanted.

  Mindy fell into step beside her. “You’re sure you haven’t had enough of the stuff today? You’re still wearing your early morning taste of it.”

  “Ha ha. I only spilled that because Christian spoke to me. If he’d left me be, like any self-respecting sex god should, I would have gone on my way and not looked like this all day.”

  As they exited the building, the ninety-degree Austin
summer air blasted Dodie’s face, making her instantly break out in a sweat. A glance at Mindy showed that the blonde, blue-eyed and perfectly thin five-foot four-inch woman appeared as fresh as she had moments before in the air-conditioned building. She never seemed to sweat. It was so damn unfair.

  “You know, you were rude to him this morning.”

  Dodie blinked, trying to follow the thread of conversation. “Do you mean Christian?” She’d told Mindy all about it when she’d first arrived at work.

  “Yes. He was trying to help you and it sounds as if not only did you blow him off, but you were rude about it.”

  “I wasn’t rude.” She’d said thank you. If she hadn’t said much else, it didn’t really matter. A man like Christian wouldn’t have given her two thoughts after she’d left. Why did she have to be Molly Manners about the whole thing?

  “You were. Did you even try to speak to him? This is not the first encounter you’ve had with him when you’ve all but sprinted to get away from him.”

  Dodie winced. It was wonderful to have a best friend and terrible that she remembered all the secrets about Dodie that she’d like to have Mindy forget.

  “I don’t know why I get shrewish and strange every time I see him. I spend enough time thinking about him. I’m just so weird.”

  They approached the coffee shop and went inside. The air-conditioning, up to high, blasted at them, sending Dodie’s body temperature into shock. The summers in Austin were spent going from too hot to too cold every time she went inside or out.

  Mindy ordered their coffee, then turned to look at Dodie. “You have a crush on him, so a little weird is to be expected, particularly because for someone as cute as you are, you have so little experience with men outside the friendship arena.”

  Dodie couldn’t deny that. “I was a fat teenager. Guys weren’t exactly lining up to take me out.”

  “Fair enough, but you’re not a fat adult. You’re twenty-five years old. You could get out a little bit. Come with Brian and me tonight. We’ll go to a bar. Someplace where people talk to one another rather than sitting around silently listening to sounds that make my ears hurt.”

  “I can’t tonight.”

  “Oh, is it Star Trek or Warcraft?” Mindy lacked the sneer Dodie expected from someone who didn’t play.

  “This is why you’re my best friend. You remember things like that.”

  She smiled, handing Dodie the coffee she’d ordered before stepping back outside. “Another night then.”

  “Sure.” She really would try to make a point of going out more. Truth was, Dodie did not want to be alone for the rest of her life. She had things she wanted to achieve that required socialization. Marriage, family, kids. Hot sex. An image of Christian skipped through her mind again. Damn him and his perfectly sculpted body.

  “Maybe you could try to talk to him the next time he speaks to you.”

  Dodie shook her head. “Really good-looking men make me really, really nervous.”

  “I know.” Mindy sighed dramatically. “Maybe just try not to run quite so fast?”

  * * * * *

  Christian counted his sit-ups as he stared out the window of the gym. Another fifty or so and he could call it a day. It was his night off from Brass and he didn’t have anywhere to go that required him to hurry up and finish. Still, as much as he loved the gym, he didn’t want to waste his one day off a week entirely inside the gym walls.

  He practically lived there and that had to stop. Four more months and he should have enough saved to open his own karate studio. Then he’d really get to be doing what he wanted to do—teaching martial arts.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t love dancing, but he had no intention of making a lifetime out of his career at Brass or from the few photographs he’d sold of himself that had landed on the covers of a dozen romance novels.

  All of that had been fun—he still couldn’t help but smile when he saw himself on a bookshelf dressed as a pirate or a cowboy—but he’d managed to keep his eye on the goal the whole time he’d worked other jobs. He would open a seemingly normal karate school, but in the back it would be something quite different. There he would teach as Master Foy had taught him—only to the chosen few bound to fight the darkness.

  This was as the master had foreseen it, and what Christian had waited for several years to see come to fruition. In the meantime he’d really been having a good time.

  Except for the whole problem with his neighbor. His redheaded, blue-eyed, freckled, curvaceous neighbor haunted his dreams and kept him hard all the time. She reminded him of Joan from the television show Mad Men. He’d always found the actress attractive, but she had nothing on Dodie Chase.

  The neighbor to his left, an eighty-year-old woman who owned a dog that yapped at all hours of the night, had told him that Dodie worked as some kind of software genius. He would love to hear her talk sometime, watch her work, smell her hair as he had that morning when he’d discovered it was scented just like strawberries.

  But every time he got near her, she scampered away. That almost never happened to him. The women he danced for could hardly keep their hands off him. He’d always loved women and had never had one avoid him so completely.

  Maybe she thought he was dumb. He stood, grabbing the towel he’d laid out. Unlike many of the other gym patrons, he always cleaned up after himself.

  Dodie would like him. He didn’t doubt it for a minute. When she didn’t dress for work, she wore comic book, anime and science fiction T-shirts over her jeans. He loved that stuff. They’d have a lot in common during the day, and at night he’d get to explore her body.

  Except she wouldn’t let him near her.

  After showering and changing in the locker room, he exited the building with a smile for the receptionist who took everyone’s card.

  “Christian. I was hoping I’d see you.” She batted her eyes. “Maybe you’d like to go out tonight?”

  “Shana. Hi.” He waved at her. She was nice but boring as all hell. “I’m afraid I’m busy tonight. But thanks. Hope you have fun.”

  If Dodie would just treat him like that, all would be well. What was he supposed to do with a woman who wanted nothing to do with him but whom he felt in his soul he was supposed to be with?

  It wasn’t as if he could demand her obedience as he would a creature of the darkness.

  He’d have to keep doing what he’d been doing—gentle and determined pursuit until she came around. The curvy redhead belonged in his bed. He would get her there if he employed a power of patience.

  His phone rang and he looked at the number. Recognizing it, he answered. “This is Christian.”

  “Hi, Christian,” Beth from the club said into his ear. As the owner’s wife, she handled all the bookings. She smoked about three packs a day and it sounded in her voice and showed on her skin, which she kept perpetually tanned.

  “What can I do for you today?” He liked her, even if some of the other dancers made her a bit of a joke, imitating the sound of her voice on the phone. She had a strong head for business and, during her husband’s periodic alcoholic binges, she kept everything running nice and smoothly for them.

  “Well, I know this is your day off and that you haven’t had one in a while…”

  “But…” he continued for her, already knowing she wanted him to come in. Why else would she bother to call?

  “Colt didn’t show up. We’re not sure what’s going on. The ex is back in the picture and we’re afraid he’s reacquired some of her drug habits.”

  “Say no more. Of course I’ll help.” The dancers all knew one another really well. It had become a brotherhood of sorts. Not the closeness he had with the others who studied with Master Foy, but friendship for certain. “What are Mitt’s intentions?” He really hoped Colt didn’t get fired. He was a good guy. Young and bound to be foolish, since he lacked mentors in his life to keep him grounded. Colt was only eighteen years old.

  “I’m not sure at this point. I know you’ll ask us
to be patient with him. For now I’m willing to try, if you’re willing to come in and dance in his stead.”

  “I’ll be right there.” He hung up and stared up at the sky. So much for figuring out a way into Dodie’s life tonight. It would have to wait. Patience.

  He smiled at a fellow pedestrian and made his way down the block. A shudder traveled through his body and he turned around. Nothing out of the ordinary. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling of utter wrongness that had moved through him.

  What had brought that on?

  Christian had long since learned to trust his instincts. They were why he’d been chosen, why he possessed the skills he’d been given.

  Austin had never been a city under siege by too much evil. Since his move from Chicago, he’d not had to do much in terms of clearing the area of all things bad. Had he become complacent?

  He looked at his phone. In the time of the ancients, from what he had read, it had been difficult for a student who had been moved away to contact his teacher. Not now. Thanks to modern technology, any information he needed was merely a phone call away.

  Or in this case a text.

  Christian wouldn’t be able to reach Master Foy directly—he spent most of his day in meditation or training—but the students who assisted him were wired up.

  Could you ask the master if he senses a particular disturbance here, Jonah?

  He sent the message and continued on his journey. At twenty-seven years old, he’d studied with the master for two decades. He didn’t need to worry about being called out for being overly imaginative. The master trusted him. It was why he’d sent him here.

  About a block from the club, his phone beeped. He crossed the street and read Jonah’s reply.

  This is Master’s response: You are where you should be on the path chosen for you.

  Sorry I can’t be more helpful, bro. He’s not being very chatty. Lately he spends most of his time in silence. J.

  That couldn’t be good. If Master got silent, he used his energy to focus in the quietness on trying to send goodness out into the universe. His cryptic answer didn’t make Christian feel any better about things. Jonah would understand the severity of this situation. If there was a way to get an answer, he would have.