Unnatural Lover Box Set #1: Demon Paranormal Romance

Chapter 2

2

Unfortunately for this day, retreat was no longer an option. The sun was setting to her left, and soon the night would settled down over both the cabin and the trail. Amanda got busy setting out her foodstuffs and making a fire. There were several propane lamps for light, and to these she turned for comfort when the shadows crept into the cabin. A soft, howling wind came up out of the north, but she was nice and comfortable inside the sturdy cabin. Before long a warm, comforting fire crackled in the hearth and the shadows of the flames flickered along the walls. She made a simple meal on the propane stove in the kitchen, and happily gobbled up the warm food. Amanda removed her shoes beside the bed in case she needed to make an emergency run in the middle of the night. Then she sat down on the rug before the fire and pulled her bag close to her.

From the large sack she retrieved a few books she had hauled up here. Most were romance novels where the woman was sought and conquered by the handsome young man. They were a dirty little delight for her, one even Tony didn’t know about. They were relatively racy and secretly she longed for him to be a little more creative in their love-life. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t give her pleasure, but a girl needed some spice in her life.

That made double for her boring existence. Born in the city in which she still resided, Amanda’s life had never been described as thrilling. She was currently a simple paper-pusher in a medium-size business, and that was after working her way up from the dark, solitary mail-room. Tony and she had met nearly a year before at one of the clubs she frequented. She wasn’t an habitual party-goer, but she enjoyed being in the company of others and watching how they interacted with one another. Secretly she considered herself an anthropologist of sorts in her amateur study of the human being. She’d always enjoyed watching the families walk past her with their children skipping along beside their parents or at the front leading the way like some adventurer through the wild jungle of the world. The parents would smile at their children’s antics and they would go off on their merry way.

Amanda touched her flat stomach and sighed. She guessed the only way to find that same happiness for herself would be to adopt, but the cost of such an endeavor was far out of her reach. Tony had been kind enough to do the math for her after he heard the bad news. It’d only made her feel worse to know it was so expensive to adopt.

“If I starved myself I could probably save up enough money in about a year,” she wondered aloud. Her soft voice echoed quietly through the empty room.

Perhaps it echoed a little too much. Amanda frowned and sat up at attention.

“Hello!” she called to the shadows and empty spaces of the room. There was that strange sound again, as though her voice had lost itself in a great cavern and only a faint echo returned to her.

Amanda took out from her bag the flashlight she had brought and shone it on the room. The beam passed over the walls and furniture, but nothing showed itself. There was no c***k in the wall to show some outside influence, nor any metallic covering on the roof which would give her small voice that large sound.

“Weird…” she murmured, though in a voice too small to echo. She looked back to her books and smiled at the racy cover on one of her e*****a paperbacks. “Maybe if I told Tony these were training books he’d read them,” she giggled to herself. She opened the soft cover and dove into the story.

The time passed gently and without her notice until the heat from the fire began to cool. Amanda glanced up from her book and was dismayed to see there was one log left of the great stack with which she had sacrificed to the flames. Hurriedly she put down her book and grabbed several of the chopped pieces from the pile. In her rush her finger caught a large, sharp splinter and blood was drawn. She hissed at the pain and dropped all the logs to the floor in her quest to assess the damage. The point of her finger dripped with blood and the sliver stuck out from the wound as though laughing at her suffering.

Amanda scowled and tore out the offending slice of wood, but that only made the flow of life liquid worse. She rushed over to her bag for a bandage and a path of tiny droplets followed her. Carefully she avoided the rugs, as she had too little water to spare on rubbing blood out of the old mats. Before she could wrap a bandage firmly the wound, blood had spilled out onto the floor and created a small puddle at her feet. She looked in disgust at the proof of her carelessness, and uneasily she swept the pool between the cracks in the floor. The rest was cleaned up with a dampened paper towel and stored in her garbage bag. It would be thrown away later and all evidence of her foolishness, save for the small scar on her finger, would be gone.

Amanda plopped herself back down on the mat only to look at the fire and recall why she had sacrificed her blood. She groaned and stood once more to collect the logs which she had tossed aside in her pain. They were soon gathered and thrown onto the fire, and she watched with glee as the flames consumed the wicked pieces which had caused her so much trouble. She returned to her books but they no longer held the fascination they had as before. Dreams could only dominate reality for so long, and the pain in her finger pulsed with the reality of pain.

She sighed and looked at the only tome which wasn’t of the romance variety. The cover read Coping With Loss: How to Manage Life Without Life. The title wasn’t exactly uplifting, but the contents were meant to soothe her sense of loss within herself. The giver of the book had been her psychiatrist, Dr. William Gerber, a young man she had been seeing since the doctor had informed her about her incurable problem. It was at the insistence of the medical doctor that she’d seen Gerber, but she was skeptical he’d help her get over her bouts of depression. Mostly she suspected he was in cahoots with the hospital through a contract and needed to fill his patient quota every quarter.

“Or maybe he’s right and I’m not dealing with this very well,” she mused aloud. She certainly wasn’t usually this narrow-minded with people’s actions. Even if the psychiatrist did have a contract with the hospital, he’d been nice to her and seemed to genuinely care about her mental well-being. He also hadn’t wanted her to go on this trip alone, but that was because he feared she’d harm herself.

Amanda glanced down at the bandage and smirked. She had to admit Dr. Gerber was right there. She had hurt herself, just not on purpose nor as badly as he feared. Even with her opinion of him slightly improved, she still didn’t think much of his book so she shoved it back into her bag. A quick glance at her watch told her it was about time to hit the hay. Her body was also yelling out for some relaxation after that long hike up the rugged path. The young woman stood up and stretched her arms high above her head.

Then she froze. There had been a noise. Amanda frowned and held very still. She swore she heard something creak along the floor. Her eyes searched over the worn boards, but she couldn’t see even the shadow of a small bug. Maybe it was a mouse, or even just her imagination.

Her breath stopped when the noise repeated itself. Now she knew it wasn’t her imagination. It sounded like something was moving beneath the floor. She let out a yelp and scrambled over to the bed. Her heart wildly beat and she waited for some little creature to pull up a board and make a homicidal dive at her. The sounds did continue, but not as loud as before and soon they faded out altogether. She waited on the bed for several minutes expecting the noise to return, but all was quiet. A soft, nervous twitter escaped her lips. She wondered if she’d gotten excited over some stupid mouse or varmint trying to dig their way in through the floorboards.

Cautiously Amanda slid off the bed and edged close to the center of the room. She thought the loudest of the noises had erupted from that point, and sought to find whether they were still there. She got on her hands and knees, and pressed an ear against the closest board. She heard a soft rustling sound and then a small tremor beneath her fingers. It was almost like there was a tiny earthquake shifting beneath the cabin, but she’d never heard of anything remotely like that happening up here.

That’s when a dark, formless shape shot out of the c***k in front of her face.