“I don’t…don’t want to go in there.” He could barely keep from gagging.
“You won’t,” his Master’s voice said in his ear. “I will. Now.”
Suddenly Y had a horrible sensation—the feeling of being pushed aside—shoved into a small, dark, cramped closet with no light and hardly any air. It was happening inside his head and yet the effect was the same as if it had happened to his physical body.
Not my body anymore, he realized, feeling sick. The Master’s body. He’s taking over completely and he’ll never let me go. I’m doomed…trapped.
His vision began to dim and he lost all feeling in his hands and feet.
“Master,” he begged, his tongue feeling clumsy in his mouth—a borrowed instrument he had once owned. “Master, please—don’t do this to me!”
Shrill laugher echoed in his skull.
“My dear Y, it’s already done,” Master Two said.
And then…there was only darkness and silence.
The End? Hardly! There is always more Kindred to come. Read on for an Excerpt of Brides of the Kindred 17, Switched. And be sure to look for the preorder link to The Institute: Daddy Issues, the first book in my new series coming out on Valentine's Day of 2016.
Also, if you have enjoyed Forgotten, please take a moment to leave a review HERE. Good reviews are like golf for an author--they help readers decide to take a chance on a new book. And more good reviews means more sales which means I can continue to write for a living and bring you more Kindred! Thank you so much to all my awesome readers who review. I love you guys!
Hugs and Happy Reading!
Evangeline, November 2015
Switched Blurb:
A warrior with a talent that could get him killed
A girl transported to a new existence with no warning
When the two of the trade lives, it places them in mortal peril.
Not to mention really screwing up their love lives!
Will they ever be able to get back in their rightful bodies?
Or have they been forever…Switched?
Francesca Rodriguez—Frankie to her friends—has a perfectly normal life. She's happily divorced and going to grad school and all she wants is to get her degree and get out of retail hell. Little does she know her life is about to change forever.
Kerov Volx is a Battalion Commander in the Tarkien Army. He loves his job and if his love life isn't anything more than satisfactory, well… he can deal with it. His only problem is that he has Switch Kindred DNA—that is, his people used to be able to trade bodies with their bonded mates. But in Tarkinian society, Switching or Trading is now an offense punishable by death. So imagine Kerov's panic when an invader suddenly takes over his body…
Frankie has no idea what's going on. She only knows she went to sleep in her own bed and woke up in the body of a huge, virile, alien warrior. Now she's expected to live his life—or risk getting both of them killed. Even worse, Kerov is now in control of her body too, and the condition appears to be permanent.
Can Frankie and Kerov Trade back into their own bodies before it's too late for both of them? Or have they been forever…Switched?
Brides of the Kindred 17: Switched
Chapter One
On Thursday morning, Frankie woke up in her own body.
Not that waking up in her own body was unusual—not at that point, anyway. And Frankie had no idea of knowing how unusual it would soon become. All she knew was that she’d hit snooze one too many times and now she was running late.
“Crap,” she muttered as she glanced at the clock on her phone and bolted out of bed. She barely had time for a shower—a super fast one—if she hurried. There was going to be no time to wash her hair though, which meant she was going to be fighting frizz all day, especially if the humidity was high. And since she lived in Tampa, Florida, the humidity was always high.
As the hot water poured over her body, she tried to wake up. Why had she kept hitting the snooze button anyway? Oh right—it was the dream she’d been having. It was almost like a story and she’d wanted to see how it ended.
As she washed, she tried to remember the details. Recalling the dream was surprisingly easy. Most dreams started to fade the moment you woke up but this one was staying with her.
It was about a guy—a really tall guy, she thought, splashing the hot water in her face and reaching for her favorite pink grapefruit shower gel.
Normally the only man she dreamed about was her ex, Carlos, and those were mostly nightmares. Nightmares that she was still stuck in her dead-end marriage with no job, no prospects, and nothing but a life of endless childbearing and housework ahead of her. Not to mention a husband who didn’t appreciate her or think she was capable of anything else. But the man in her dreams had looked nothing like Carlos.
He had short blond hair—or at least, it was really light brown. And those eyes— she shivered. His eyes had been a pale shade of gray Frankie had never seen before. So pale they were almost white but with a solid black ring around the irises that made him look scarily intense. In fact, everything about him was intense. In her dream, he’d been barking orders at a bunch of other guys. All were tall and lean, dressed in some kind of uniform and they shouted back in unison when he asked them questions.
Weird, Frankie thought. Like some kind of Army recruitment film or something. Except the uniform her dream guy was wearing wasn’t like anything from any branch of the Armed Forces that Frankie had ever seen. It was scarlet with accents of gold and the trousers that went with it were black with a scarlet stripe running up the sides. Tall black boots completed the outfit.
He’d been barking orders and marching up and down the line of warriors or soldiers or whatever they were and then the tall, blond man with the scary gray eyes had turned his head and…
“And he looked right at me,” Frankie whispered to herself. She shook her head, trying to get rid of the image. “Don’t be crazy, Frankie—it was only a dream,” she muttered to herself, getting out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself and wiped steam off the mirror. A woman with black hair and big brown eyes looked back at her as she reached for her toothbrush.
Frankie—who had been christened Francesca Benita Hermosa Rodriguez— came from a big, traditional Latin family. She was the fourth of seven children, three girls and four boys. Her two sisters, Alma and Carita, were married and had six kids between them. Her two older brothers, Julio and Dominic were also married and of the two younger ones, Tomas was engaged and Aurelio was dating a girl seriously—the family expected him to propose to at any time.
It was enough to make you sick.
Not that Frankie had anything against marriage and family and commitment—she had tried it herself, after all. Her whole family had expected her to marry her high school sweetheart and so that was what she had done. And then she’d spent a miserable five years cooking and cleaning up after him, putting up with him the nights he came home drunk and abusive, and trying to be happy because this was the way life was supposed to be, right?
“Wrong,” Frankie said aloud to herself. “That wasn’t me—wasn’t the life I wanted.”
She often thought that if it wasn’t for her best friend, Lacy, she never would have made it. Lacy was the only one who saw how miserable she was—and she’d been the one to encourage Frankie to take some college classes and provided her with a steady supply of birth control for which Frankie was eternally grateful. Not that she didn’t want kids eventually, but it had only taken her a couple of months with Carlos to know she didn’t want his kids and having children would have compounded an already bad situation.
Despite being miserable, Frankie had stuck out the marriage for five long years because she didn’t want to disappoint her parents. Finally, though, she couldn’t take it anymore. When she told her family that she was filing for divorce, her extremely Catholic grandmother had fainted dramatically and her father had disowned her.
That had been hard—maybe the hardest thing
she’d ever gone through. But Frankie was strong—a lot stronger than she’d given herself credit for. She made a new life for herself, going to college full time to get a degree in Women’s Studies. Eventually she hoped to get a PhD and teach but for now, she was just trying to get her Masters Degree without taking on too many student loans.
Frankie finished brushing her teeth and rinsed, taking a final look at herself in the mirror. Whoever had lived in this apartment before her must have been tall—she had to stand on her tiptoes to see more than just her face. Of course, they wouldn’t have to be very tall to be taller than her.
She was a stubby five foot four with what her friend Lacy charitably called, “a juicy caboose.” To put it bluntly—she had a big butt. Frankie often thought she looked completely unremarkable from the waist up—she had B-cup breasts that were nicely shaped and perky enough. But from the waist down, her child-bearing hips and big behind got lots of looks and some outright stares if she didn’t dress to minimize her flaws.
“Not that it’s a flaw,” Frankie told herself sternly, as she dried the body part in question and pulled on some clothes. “It’s part of me—part of my heritage.” Still, she couldn’t help feeling self-conscious about her ass whenever she went out wearing anything form fitting like yoga pants.
She finished toweling off and pulled on a plain khaki skirt and a blue blouse. The outfit would do for her morning class, as well as her shift at work later on. A glance at the clock told her she was still running late. She knew her sisters who lived across town were already up and seeing their older kids off to school and her brothers were probably at work. None of them understood her need to go back to school and change her whole existence. Her mother was still hoping she might get back together with Carlos—Frankie knew because her mom had been inviting her ex to family suppers on the weekends.
“Mira, Mom, it’s not going to happen,” she’d told her mother. “Carlos and I are never getting back together so please just stop inviting him.”
“You were so perfect together in school, mi hija.” Her mother had looked at her reproachfully. “And I know Carlos still loves you.” She had nodded at Carlos, who sat at the end of the table making sad eyes in Frankie’s direction.
Frankie had been unable to contain her surge of irritation. “What he loved was being my boss—running my life,” she told to her mother under her breath. “But I don’t want anyone else running my life. It’s my life—so let me live it. I want to try new things—to experience the world on my own terms and be open to anything—anything at all.”
If only she had known that her wish was soon to be granted—and not in the way that she’d imagined.
But for now, she was blissfully ignorant. She hummed as she grabbed a mango-kiwi-chia seed smoothie she’d whipped up the night before from the fridge. Frankie was a strict vegetarian—another change she’d made as soon as she got away from Carlos. She wasn’t a vegan or anything extreme—she just didn’t eat meat. She felt better and healthier and lighter somehow, even though her new diet earned her many concerned looks from her mother and grandmother when she went home for family dinners.
“But don’t you want any puerco asado? Just try a little piece,” her mother would wheedle.
“I made your favorite chicharones,” her abuela would say. She was still deeply disapproving of Frankie’s divorced status and lit a candle for her daily in church, praying to the Blessed Virgin that her granddaughter would see sense and come back to her rightful husband.
“No thank you, mom, abuelita,” Frankie always said, giving her grandmother a kiss on the cheek. “I feel healthier when I don’t eat meat. But I’d love more rice, please.”
Her grandmother always shook her head but she couldn’t argue that Frankie was wasting away. Despite her vegetarian diet and regular exercise, Frankie’s J-Lo booty stuck stubbornly with her and refused to melt—which seemed really unfair. Neither of her sisters had such a big butt, even after having multiple children apiece.
Not that she needed to be like her sisters, Frankie reminded herself as she got into her ancient Honda Civic and started it up. She’d tried that for years—now it was time to embrace her own identity and get comfortable inside her own skin.
It was a short drive from her crappy apartment in the Carlton Arms complex to the USF campus. Living on campus itself was too expensive. Though she had to take loans to cover her classes and books, Frankie tried her best to pay her own living expenses. This meant living in a less than safe part of town and working a series of crappy jobs, even though students in the Masters programs were encouraged to focus exclusively on their studies.
She didn’t usually mind her apartment—it might look ugly on the outside but inside Frankie had transformed the tiny space into a neat, pretty little nest. However, the crappy job thing was beginning to get her down. If only there were enough TA positions to go around! But it seemed like every professor on campus already had all the help they needed. Which meant that Frankie was stuck doing time in retail, working at Victoria’s Secret in the University Square mall. In fact, she had a shift right after her morning class, Women in Modern Literature.
Frankie sighed when she thought of it. She was sure some of her fellow Women’s Studies students would scoff at her for working in a place that glorified the objectification and sexualization of women’s bodies. But at the time she’d taken the job, she’d been desperate to get away from Carlos and make it on her own. Victoria’s Secret was the only place that was hiring so Frankie had applied. Now she was stuck selling overpriced panties and bras—at least until she completed her two hundred hour yoga certification.
Soon, she promised herself, bouncing up the stairs of the Humanities building. Soon I’ll be out of there for good. In fact, her final test was coming up in two days and she was trying to get in as many classes between now and then as she could, both to practice and to calm her nerves. The two hundred hour certification was enough to teach in most studios but Sheila, the owner of the Lotus Pond where Frankie took her teacher training, was very particular. She had a test that was legendary for being tough to pass. But Frankie knew she was ready. If she could only pass, Sheila had promised she could teach several beginner’s classes a week to start out.
“Focus on your breathing,” Frankie imagined herself telling her students. “Feel the breath flow in and out of you…breath is life…breathe into any tight spaces and as you exhale, rid yourself of anything that does not serve you…”
“Oh, Francesca—I was hoping to see you here this morning.”
The soft, male voice interrupted her thoughts and Frankie turned quickly, her heart pounding.
“Oh, Professor Ramlow.” She smoothed her fly-away hair nervously, wishing she’d gotten up in time to wash it. “Good morning.”
“Now, Francesca, how often do I have to tell you to call me Todd?” He smiled at her benevolently.
“Of course…Todd.” Frankie smiled at him shyly. Professor Ramlow was one of the few males teaching in the Women’s Studies department and he also happened to be very handsome—in a generic, white guy kind of way. But that was fine with Frankie—she’d had enough Latin machismo bullshit to last her a lifetime with Carlos. She was so sick of male posturing—she could definitely see herself with a sensitive, enlightened, emotionally intelligent man. Even if he was white and Protestant, which would undoubtedly give her abuela another fainting fit.
Frankie sighed inwardly. Too bad, Professor Ramlow was married because there was definitely some kind of attraction between them. She had taken his course, Literature by Women of Color, and had stayed after one day to argue about one of the poems they were studying. Ever since, he made it a point to talk to her and pay her special attention whenever he saw her.
Even though she knew he was married, Frankie couldn’t help feeling flattered by the way he singled her out. She was older than the traditional student, after all, and she wasn’t Barbie-doll pretty like most of the twenty-year-old co-eds running around campus. Her fly
-away hair and big behind were the exact opposite of the slim girls with their long, straight hair she saw all around her. Yet Professor Ramlow—Todd—seemed interested in her—seemed to respect her intellect. And after years of living with a man who only cared about her cooking and cleaning skills, it was refreshing to find someone who liked the fact that she had a brain.
“I’m so glad I caught you,” Todd said, smiling at her. “I know you’ve been looking for a TA position and something has just opened up.”
“It has?” Frankie couldn’t keep the eagerness out of her voice. “With you?” Though teaching Yoga classes would help her leave retail hell, it still wouldn’t make her enough to move into a nicer, safer place. But being a TA and teaching some classes on the side would certainly pay enough to get her out of the starving-student gutter.
Todd nodded. “Yes, with me. So I was wondering if we could have dinner tomorrow night and discuss it?”
Frankie felt her heart flutter. Stop it, she told herself sternly. It’s only a job he’s talking about and besides, he’s married! Still, it was flattering that he would come looking for her because he wanted her especially as his new TA.
“I’d love that…Todd,” she said, smiling shyly. “Where and what time?”
“Well, I was hoping maybe we could go to your place.” He shifted uneasily, his genial smile slipping just a little. “You see, Jackie—my wife—and I are, er, going through a rather messy divorce. And I don’t need to give her any more ammunition by letting myself be seen with such a beautiful woman out in public.”
“Oh, well…” Frankie could feel herself blushing. “My place isn’t in the best part of town, you know. I really can’t afford—”
“I don’t care about the location,” Todd assured her quickly. “All I’m interested in is the company.” He took Frankie’s hand and squeezed it gently, looking into her eyes. “What do you say? I can bring take-out from Lemon Grass—they were just voted the best Thai restaurant in the Bay area.”