Lakeside Cougars 2 Preview


“Are you sure we shouldn’t drive down?” Edith asked.

“Trust me, Edith, there’s not even enough for us all to carry something. There’s basically just a suitcase of my extra clothes that I left behind,” Atticus replied.

“And walking is nice, especially on days like today,” Colleen said, looking skyward.

He did as well.

She was right, it was shaping up to be another perfect Oregon day. Or at least perfect for him: low-to-mid sixties, light breeze, faint gray cloud cover, the potential for rain sometime in the evening. It was absolutely perfect.

And while his life did not feel perfect right now, it sure as hell felt good.

They had decided to move the rest of his stuff over pretty much immediately after they’d wrapped up that big conversation about the immediate future.

“So you can really just...not go home?” Edith asked as they closed in on his lakehouse.

“If I don’t want to, yeah. Why?” Atticus replied.

“It’s just-I mean, what about your responsibilities? Friends? Family?”

“I wrapped up and then closed off as many responsibilities as I could over the last nine months so I could focus on Cold Reset. Then I made sure to wrap up everything else as much as I could before coming here. I also definitely neglected my relationships to do that. But...I have to admit, after doing that and then actually looking back over those relationships, I have come to the conclusion that most of my friends are more acquaintances than friends.”

“What made you come to that conclusion?” Colleen asked. She had the tone of a pleased teacher trying to determine if the student actually understood what they were talking about.

“I looked over our conversations and thought back to hanging out. Honestly, it’s just that few of them seemed to...care, I guess. A lot of my friendships felt one-sided and there was this part of me that I think is almost dead, or at least severely weakened, that was pretty desperate for human contact, that was putting in far, far more effort than I was receiving. And I get that it’s not going to be perfectly matched all the time, but it was clear most of them just didn’t have that much invested. Which, also, I’m not saying they had to be at my beck and call twenty four seven, but…”

“I get it,” Edith said.

“So, wait, you’re saying the part of you that desires human contact is mostly dead?” Colleen asked.

“No. That-yeah, that could’ve been worded better. That part of me has been satisfied a great deal more recently, but I think...dead isn’t quite right. Perhaps, tamed? Calmed? I went into isolation to get Cold Reset made and at first it was really hard but after about three months, I realized that I didn’t actually want what I thought I wanted. I just felt like I had to want it.”

“And that exact feeling is the backbone of civilization right now,” Colleen muttered. “But I’m glad you figured that out. It’s...a curiosity.”

“So how exactly is a desire for human contact the backbone of civilization? I mean, I can see how, but what do you mean?” Edith asked.

Atticus abruptly caught onto that particular interplay between the two women. There was a vague undercurrent of desperation of Edith’s voice when she asked that specific question, and either he was extremely well-tuned to her already, or he was just familiar with this, but he had a strong notion of what it meant.

It was the kind of tone someone adopted when they heard something they perceived as smart and either didn’t get, or didn’t trust their interpretation, and then was filled with the urge to know exactly what the other person meant, to measure their own intelligence against the other person’s.

Which actually made a great deal of sense, given the shape of their shared history.

And his own history. It was not a good feeling.

“Unhappy people spend more money than happy people,” Colleen replied. “So most of the people in positions of commercial authority have a strongly vested interest in keeping us unhappy. Right now, that is what grips out entire society. It infects everything, like radiation in the air, toxic waste in the groundwater. Invisible and devastating. But it’s so very nice to break away from that. To realize that listening to some twenty two year old influencer with more plastic surgery than brain cells is, in fact, not the path to happiness.”

“I guess so...what is the path to happiness, then?” Edith asked.

They were coming up to his lakehouse now. As he slipped the key into the lock, he shared a brief look with Colleen, who looked slightly worried. One of the reasons everything wasn’t perfect: Edith was still suffering.

They all were, probably.

It was just being outshone, for the most part, by all their hedonistic sexual escapades.

“The problem with that question,” Atticus replied as he unlocked the door and let them inside, “is that while there are some common markers to follow, the path to happiness is different for each person. One path to abject misery for one person might be a path to utter bliss for another.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Edith murmured.

“And we’ll help you figure out your way there.”

She looked at him. “You’ll help me figure out, what, how to be happy?”

“I mean, yeah. Well, we’ll try.”

“That is what I’ve been trying to do since I came back,” Colleen said. “Although I realize now that I haven’t quite been trying hard enough.”

“No, that’s-don’t think that,” Edith replied. “I know you’ve been trying. It isn’t that you weren’t trying hard enough. If anything, I think you were doing a good job, because I clearly have not been ready to, mmm, how to put this? I guess, hear you? But don’t think you haven’t been a good friend since coming back.”

Colleen pursed her lips, clearly not in agreement, but she relented. “I suppose I’ll have to just accept that.” She looked to Atticus. “Have you decided what you’re going to tell Kate about all this?”

“No,” he replied. “Although I imagine it won’t be very complicated. Just let her know I’m staying longer.”

“Atticus,” Colleen said, her tone reproachful.

“What?” he asked.

“That girl is very infatuated with you. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“I really think you’re reading too much into that,” Atticus said. Colleen crossed her arms. Shit, she was really good at that ‘stern teacher’ look. The glasses helped a lot. “Seriously! I’m not saying she doesn’t give a shit about me, but what we have going on is just...hormones. We’re having fun, we’re not falling in love.”

“You’d better be damn sure that she isn’t falling in love if you aren’t,” Colleen replied.

“I mean how sure can I be?! Edith, we need a tiebreaker.”

Both of them stared at her. Edith sighed. “I think that...I haven’t spent enough time with her to know one way or the other.”

“How diplomatic,” Colleen said.

“I mean it!”

“I believe that you mean it, I’m just annoyed.” She pursed her lips and shifted her strong gaze back to Atticus. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

“I don’t either,” he replied. “For real, you and I are on the same page there. I just think that you’re reading too much into what we’ve got going on.”

“And I think your self depreciative tendencies are blinding you to just how much she likes you.”

“I genuinely understand why you think that, I really truly do, but I think maybe something similar is happening with you. I mean, I could be wrong. Generally speaking, I’ve found myself inclined to agree with your assessments over mine if they clashed, but this is a case where my gut is telling me I’m right.”

“Hmm.” Colleen stared at him for a moment longer, then seemed to decide to let it drop. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“I will talk with her, and soon. Now, uh, I need to get my shit and straighten up and say goodbye.”

“Say goodbye to who?” Edith asked.

“To this lakehouse. Um, I’ll explain on the way back.”

“Okay.” She looked at Colleen. “We should probably help.”

“Yeah, I would like to get home,” she agreed. “Atticus, you get your stuff, I’ll take care of the dishes and Edith can straighten up. Honestly, there’s not really much to do.”

“No, I didn’t spend nearly as much time here as I thought I would,” Atticus agreed, heading for the stairs.

He walked up them and into the master bedroom. He stopped just beyond the doorway, a strangeness settling over him. He couldn’t tell if it was good or bad, or something else entirely. He couldn’t even determine what emotion it was eliciting.

After lingering there for a few seconds more, he kept going. Much like Colleen, he wanted to get back home. Even if they couldn’t have that threesome tonight, he very much wanted to do other things with both of them.

Atticus gathered up the rest of his clothing and a book he’d forgotten that he’d brought. He looked around for his spare suitcase before eventually remembering that he’d only come down here with one suitcase and one laptop case, both of which were over at Colleen’s already. Sighing softly, he finished gathering everything up in his arms.

He headed out the door and began heading downstairs, then hesitated and looked around. He wanted to linger, but he didn’t know why. He looked around, wondering if he was missing something, then drifted to the second bedroom and looked inside. Looked at the beds, the closet with the ladder, out the window.

What was this feeling?

He lingered for a bit, then walked to the window. He could see the rise in land, the road, beyond the rise would be the town, several miles off. He could just see the side of a building, what he was pretty sure was the pet shelter. It had been there since he used to come here, but he knew it hadn’t been a pet shelter back then.

If it had, he would’ve gone up there at least a few times and hung out with the cats and dogs and anything else they might have up there.

“You okay up there?” Colleen called.

“Yeah,” he called back.

Well, whatever it was, he wasn’t going to find it up here. Atticus walked back downstairs and found Colleen drying her hands. She turned to look at him, a smile on her face. When she saw him, her smile faltered.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he replied.

“What’s wrong? Did something happen?” Edith asked from somewhere nearby.

“No, nothing happened,” he replied. “I’m just feeling...weird. I don’t know. Being here is kind of messing with me, but I don’t know why. I’m not even sure if it’s a bad thing.”

“Hmm.” Colleen put a single finger to her pursed lips. She looked around for a moment. “Well...this is your halcyon place. It embodies your childhood, the best parts of it. That can’t mean nothing.”

Atticus considered it, looked around as well. “There are a lot of memories here. And this is the place I yearned for. I wanted to come back to. I guess...this kind of feels like...saying goodbye to my childhood? Or more than that, maybe. Saying goodbye to this fantasy I’d had of returning to this place on my own terms.”

“Didn’t it all go well, though?” Edith asked, joining them in the kitchen.

“Yeah, it did. Far, far better than I ever could have realistically dreamed. I’m not upset, exactly, but I am a little sad.”

“You’re losing something,” Colleen replied. “That’s often a sad experience, regardless of the circumstances.”

“I guess so.” He looked around again, then down at the bundle in his arms. “I’m done.”

“I thought you said you had a suitcase,” Edith said.

“I forgot that I just have the one, and it’s already back over there. But this is an easy load to handle.”

“Can we go back to the house now? Because I would like to handle your load,” Colleen replied.

He looked at her with something like surprise, but that was quickly swept away by lust when he looked into her eyes.

“Very yes,” he replied, making Colleen laugh.

Edith sighed. “I somehow regret and also don’t regret all the fucking we did.”

“Let Past Edith have her happiness and bask in the knowledge that Future Edith will absolutely be getting laid, very intensely, by both of us,” Atticus replied.

Edith laughed. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

They took one more quick look around, then left the lakehouse. Atticus locked up and they started walking back to Colleen’s place.

Also known as his new, if temporary, home.

Holy God, he was actually shacking up with a legitimate cougar. An absurdly attractive one at that. And so much more. She was fun and smart and horny. He had admittedly been a little worried about that last one, unsure if the legends of lust that awoke in middle-aged women were true or not. Obviously it couldn’t be all of them, but he wasn’t sure if it had been an actual thing that most women had a decent chance of experiencing or wishful thinking on the part of guys like him.

Those who appreciated the wonder of finely aged women.

They had made it nearly to the front door when his phone started ringing.

“Who’s this now?” Edith muttered, sounding vaguely irritated.

“It’s…” He shifted his bundle until he managed to free a hand and get his phone out. “Kate. I gotta take that.”

“Yeah,” Colleen agreed.

Edith took his bundle and Colleen unlocked the door. They headed inside, leaving him to answer the phone.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Immediately he could tell she was not happy. “Atticus...I need a favor.”

“I’m listening.”

“I need you to pry yourself out from between your sugar cougars and help me clean up a house. I’m at the middle lakehouse across the lake and...I can actually see you right now. Um, sorry. The family that was just here fucking wrecked the place. Like, bad. And I will deal with them later, but for right now, I have to get this place cleaned up and ready, because the family who’s coming in will be here in about twelve hours.”

“Twelve hours? But that’s like three in the morning.”

“I know. It’s how they roll. What matters is that I have other things I need to do today, but I also need to get this house cleaned up. They’re basically my best clients. They rent for a whole month, which is more expensive than it sounds, and some people have also let me know that they’re big spenders in town and that’s more important than ever now...I’m sorry, I know I’m dumping a cold bucket of responsibility in your lap but I’m fucking begging you here. I will do…” Her tone suddenly changed to something more provocative. “Whatever your heart desires.”

“Kate, come on, are we seriously going to trade sexual favors?” he asked.

“Yeah. Why not?”

Atticus began to reply, but nothing came to mind. He thought about it for a moment.

“You can’t think of a reason, can you?” she asked.

“I guess I just feel weird about it, but if you’re down, I’m down. What’ll I get out of this?”

“Why don’t you come over here and start helping me and we’ll negotiate?”

“Oh, sure. Sounds completely legit.”

Her voice became shockingly seductive. “Come on, Atticus. You know I’m good for it.”

He actually felt his pulse speed up. “I’ll be right over.”

She laughed. “Holy shit, it actually does work. Okay, I’ll be here cleaning. Also, like, thank you. Seriously, fucking life saver.”

“You’re welcome, Kate. Be right over. I gotta go break the news.”

“Good luck.”

They hung up and he headed back inside. He heard the women talking and followed their voices to Colleen’s bedroom. She was holding up some fishnet stockings and Edith was studying them. They both fell silent and looked over as he came in.

“Everything okay? You look...nervous,” Colleen asked.

He chuckled. “Kate needs my help. Not an emergency, well, not exactly, but she needs help cleaning the lakehouse across the way.”

“That’s actually kind of perfect,” Colleen replied. “You can be alone with her, talk to her about whatever you need to.”

“Yeah, seems like a good idea,” Edith agreed.

“Thank you for understanding.” He walked in and gave both of them quick kisses, then looked down at the stockings. “You gonna wear those?”

“I thought Edith could,” she replied.

“I’m...considering it. Would you like that, Atticus?” she asked, smiling a small smile.

“Uh fuck yes I’d like that,” he replied immediately.

“I think that’s settled then.” He looked at the stockings again, then sighed and shook his head. “I have to get out of here or I’m going to break my promise.”

“Well now, we can’t have that, young man,” Colleen murmured. “Off with you then.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and she smirked, just a little.

Atticus hurried for the door.

Goblin Girls Do It Better III Preview | Chapter I

Here we are at last, with the third and final Goblin Girls Do It Better!

First chapter is below.

Second chapter is on my Patreon for 1$/month Patrons.

Third chapter and on through to the end will be posting for 3$/month Patrons in this collection.

I hope you enjoy!


Something awaited them in the logging mill’s attic.

Lucas looked to Nysa. She had heard it as well.

He made quick motions to her. She nodded tightly and slipped off. It was still impressive, how silently she could move, given her build. Whatever it was, it shifted again. There were two ways up into the attic of the old mill, and as Nysa got into position at the ladder, he began ascending the stairs. She moved with him, carefully hauling herself up the old rungs.

Both ladder and stairwell creaked.

Lucas prepared himself for the worst, though he had the impression that whatever it was up there wasn’t particularly large. That didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t dangerous. He flashed back to that damned Larsis creature from a few months ago and how close he’d come then.

He was going to be first up, as the stairwell was exposed. He crept up it, crossbow at the ready, and studied what there was to see. It looked about as he’d expected it to: a dusty room, half-filled with an uneven mishmash of supplies and furniture. Gray sunlight filtered in through a poorly maintained roof and a single window across the way, slanting shafts of pale light across the chaos.

There were no obvious signs of recent passage, but even as he came to the top of the stairs, he heard something shift near the center of the room. He saw Nysa’s dark-haired head rise into view from behind a low bookshelf across the way.

He made a few more quick hand motions to her and she nodded once more.

He loved working with Nysa. Each of the women now in his life offered him something unique, some special thing that they shared, mostly by dint of who they were. Ella offered a comforting, social ease, a sense of relaxation. Talia offered him a seriousness that most of the others lacked. She was the one he went to when he was craving longer or more philosophical conversations that the others simply lacked the patience for or interest in.

Nysa, however, offered him something he’d forgotten he enjoyed: a fierce, brutal competence in the field. She acted like the old hand adventurers he ran into, like the veterans of war who could never really go back, even after the war was over, and instead opted to roam the land.

Her seriousness still made her stick out back at the village, and it was clear that even now, she was still struggling somewhat. Out here though? She seemed in her element as nowhere else, and something in him responded very strongly to that.

Sometimes they spent entire trips out in the forest without exchanging a single word, both of them not even just comfortable operating this way, but comforted by it in some ill-defined, tacit manner that probably wasn’t very healthy.

Well, he supposed that was all right. The world was often not a healthy place.

They crept forward, the attic a potential battlefield.

They’d hit this abandoned mill for the same reason they’d been hitting derelict locations for a few weeks now: resources. Either stuff they could make practical use of immediately or stuff they could sell. Although he was finding it a little ridiculous, just how much ‘stuff to sell’ they had. It now occupied a pile at the back of their main cave and it was beginning to resemble a dragon’s hoard, simply because they had nowhere to offload it.

But that was a problem for the rapidly approaching future.

Whatever it was, it shifted suddenly. It was low to the floor, had to be hiding beneath a huge dresser that sat near the center of a cluster of random objects. Lucas had a strengthening suspicion of what it was, especially as he caught a whiff of strong animal scent, but he had to be sure. Once he saw Nysa was in place, he pulled out his sword and then poked the dresser with it.

It tilted back just a little, an inch and a half maybe, and then he released it. It banged to the floor and something let out a chittering yell and scurried out of the cluster of furniture in a frantic motion. Lucas sighed heavily in relief as he saw that it was indeed just a raccoon. Nysa frowned in disappointment as she watched it race off to a hole in the roof and vanish.

“Disappointing,” she muttered.

He chuckled. “You were hoping for a fight?”

“Maybe.” She considered it. “I suppose not.” She looked down, frowning. “And I suppose we must now search this place over.”

“From the top down is often a good policy,” Lucas replied.

Nysa sighed and sheathed her blade. “I guess we should get to work then.”

He nodded and they did.

It had been a month since they’d celebrated finding the Heart of Peace.

Lucas had been expecting things to happen, but while he would not say it hadn’t been a busy month, it had sure been an uneventful one. Which he was fine with. Very fine with, actually, given everything he’d been running around getting done, but it was making him paranoid. Like something was coming for them, it was just taking its time getting there.

For the most part, they’d just been building and gathering.

Making a village from scratch was a lot of work. Doing so with mostly the help of goblins was even more work, given how prone they were to...giving into disruptive thoughts. Thankfully, most of those thoughts were along the line of ‘I want to tickle my friend’ and not ‘I want to set this hut on fire’. Or, at least, if it was like that second one, they didn’t give into it.

Although Lucas had been learning that goblins needed ways of releasing pressure. It was actually a kind of fascinating learning experience, but at some point he’d become aware of the fact that there was indeed some kind of ebb and flow to their more psychotic tendencies. There was this kind of internal pressure that built in them, naturally and eternally.

Some things could make the pressure build faster, some things could slow the pressure’s growth, but you couldn’t stop it. And, Lucas had deduced finally, even if he could, he wouldn’t. Because it was somehow integral to who they were, some crucial, core component of their own internal goblin essence. He knew it partially because he had something similar in himself.

And so, in order to keep them from doing big insane things, he had been learning that they could do little wild things and that would be fine, provided it was done often enough. It was so interesting because, except for perhaps Talia, none of them seemed aware of this. He had been slowly introducing the concept to them over the past few weeks and it seemed to be going...all right.

“So I was meaning to ask,” Nysa said, breaking the silence that had begun to fill the attic, “how are you holding up? I know most everyone has been more difficult lately.”

Lucas chuckled. “Yeah. I’m all right. Finding myself a little run down, and I’d like to get more sleep, but it hasn’t gotten serious quite yet.”

It had occurred to him at some point over the last two weeks that the abrupt uptick in arguing, crying, or yelling goblin girls was a direct result of so many of them being pregnant. He’d been around pregnant women before, (for a while there, he’d sought them out, for obvious reasons), so he at least knew that pregnancy could screw up emotions. Izzy had become a holy terror at times, getting into arguments with everyone over just about everything.

Every day that passed, Lucas found himself even more grateful for Nysa, Kiara, Clover, Syl, and Jacinda. Although in truth, it was Syl who was doing a lot of heavy lifting, emotionally speaking. He had often heard her described as the mother of the village, and it seemed truer than ever. She seemed to spend most of her time counseling the others, breaking up fights, or whatever other emotional oddjobs cropped up.

And while Lucas was more or less living a dream of sleeping with seven very noticeably pregnant women, he had promised himself after a particularly brutal day last week that he was never, ever, ever again impregnating more than three of them at a time. And he was certain that this conviction was only going to strengthen after they actually gave birth.

He was also absolutely certain that if they really wanted to get pregnant, the goblin women he shared his life with could pretty easily talk him into it.

Lucas glanced at Nysa. He thought the conversation would keep going, and from what little he could see of her expression, he thought she was struggling to think of something else to say. He hid a smile and kept searching through the mess for the moment.

Their relationship was...still being sorted out.

He had honestly expected something to have happened between them by now, as Nysa was clearly interested in him. She’d avoided him for a little while, but then seemed to go in the opposite direction this last month, hardly leaving his side. He kept thinking something would happen, because she was giving him all the correct signals.

He thought she might come to him abruptly and confess her feelings, or kiss him randomly, or perhaps wake him in the middle of the night. In fact, a few times, he’d been sure that she was about to actually talk to him regarding her feelings, but she didn’t follow through.

For a time, he’d simply settled on the idea that she had decided she wasn’t interested. Which was fine. If you weren’t into someone, then you just weren’t into them. But she had been hitting on him, and all four of his wives had, at one point or another, let slip that she’d had discussions with them about the possibility off sleeping with him.

In truth, he had the idea that he was looking at a very long, very extended case of a woman trying to make up her mind. What was truly confusing him, though, was why it was taking so long. Things had more or less settled. Sure, there was more to be done, but life in the village felt comfortable now. It had something of a routine to it.

No, something was bugging her still, but he was beginning to suspect that it didn’t actually have anything to do with him.

So, while she sorted it out, he was glad to keep spending time with her and occasionally flirting.

Speaking of which…

“Hey, can you move this for me?” Lucas asked after he’d finished searching a dresser.

“Yeah,” Nysa replied, striding over and picking it up.

“You’re so strong,” he marveled as she set it down elsewhere.

Nysa paused and although she was facing away from him, he could almost hear her blushing with a small smile on her face. He’d taken to saying that to her. At first she had mistook it for mocking, given she’d informed him multiple times she was stronger than he was before he’d essentially dominated her with speed and skill. But he had convinced her that it was a genuine compliment, and at some point she’d realized he was flirting with her whenever he brought it up.

“You know,” she said, still facing away from him, walking to a desk and beginning to look through it, “most men do not value physical strength in their women.”

“You should by now that I’m not like most other men, at least in this regard,” Lucas replied.

She snorted. “Yeah, I was going to say, you’re exactly like most men in how easy it is for one of your wives or mistresses to get to you to do things. All they have to do is lift their dress.”

“Is that so unreasonable? I’m literally surrounded by attractive women all day every day, most of whom I’ve impregnated, almost all of whom I’ve slept with.”

He and Kiara still pretty regularly went at it. He didn’t say it outright, but at this point, she was the only one who he hadn’t been intimate with.

“Not unreasonable, I suppose,” she murmured.

He paused, noticing a change in her tone. He looked at her. She was no longer searching the desk, instead just staring down at it.

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Nysa,” he said.

“I know you didn’t,” she replied, finally turning around and fixing him with a firm stare. “I’m not angry. I just wanted to say that...I know we’ve danced around sex since the beginning. And I know that I’ve said I want to, and that I will. And that you’ve been extremely patient with me. And none of that has changed.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re obligated to do it,” he replied. “If how we’re going along now is more comfortable for you, I won’t resent you for it. I won’t ask you to change it.”

She smiled an awkward smile. “I really appreciate that. And I believe you, truly. I don’t feel like you’re trying to guilt me into it. And I wanted to say that I’m going to be ready to do it soon. I’m still...examining my emotions, about certain things. Something’s bothering me, something we haven’t really dealt with yet.”

“I’m willing to talk about it, whatever it is,” he replied.

“I know, and I’m thankful, and I will. Just...not quite yet. That being said...I would like a kiss.”

“Right now?” he asked. She nodded. “Gladly.”

Lucas felt his heart flutter briefly in his chest as he stepped up to her and placed his hands on her hips. He’d been hoping for this since he first saw her. He waited, seeing if she wanted him to take the lead or not, and she didn’t. She leaned in, a surprisingly shy half-smile on her flushed face, and pressed her lips to his own.

She had very nice lips. After a brief pause as she kissed him, Nysa tilted her head and slipped a hand over the back of his neck. She pulled him deeper into the kiss, and he had to duck to get it properly, (something he was very used to by now), and then she parted his lips with her own and pushed her tongue into his mouth.

It had a different feel than the others, a different shape as well, and a different taste. Her natural taste was stronger, more intense. She kissed him with a fierce passion for about five more seconds, their tongues twisting and tasting, and then she pulled back, a little abruptly.

“Oh wow,” she said softly, breathing more heavily.

“Good, I take it?” he replied.

“Yes. Good.” She blinked. “I had...forgotten.”

“Just how satisfying and intense physical intimacy can be?”

“Yes.”

“Once you’re feeling ready, I will be more than happy to reacquaint you with it.”

“I appreciate that.” She cleared her throat. “We should probably get back to work.”

“We should,” he agreed.

Beneath the Ashes 3 | Preview

The third and final Beneath the Ashes novel is finally arriving!

Below you can read the first chapter for free.

You can find the second chapter right here for 1$/month on my Patreon.

You can read the rest of the novel as I write it in early access here for 3$/month on my Patreon.

Enjoy!


Ethan was as close to death as he had ever been.

He and Kasumi froze as one of the Death Bots they were carefully maneuvering their way around abruptly halted and turned his way. They waited as it seemed to scrutinize them, both covering it with their rifles. They’d packed armor piercing rounds for this trip, but he knew that if they were discovered here and now, they’d die.

The Bots would rip them limb from limb while pumping them full of bullets.

The red light of the Bot’s eyes seemed malignant, hateful even. Suddenly, it turned away and resumed doing whatever it had been doing. Ethan slowly exhaled, his body relaxing just the slightest. He looked to Kasumi.

Even her poker face was starting to slip. She had a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead. She nodded her head gently to her left and he nodded. They resumed their journey.

When Donovan had come to him with a new mission, Ethan had been dubious from the start. Mostly because the expression in the man’s eyes had immediately given away the fact that it was going to be extremely high risk.

Take out a Death Bot factory.

More of them had been showing up in the two weeks that had passed since they had saved the bastion and come back from that extremely bizarre place. That alone would’ve been a problem, but one that they could handle. But that wasn’t the only issue arising.

The creatures that had been getting smarter and coming in closer and closer to the bastion were now smarter and closer than ever.

But that was a future problem, for the moment he knew he needed all his focus.

And all his luck.

If the old tech that was standing between him and death didn’t keep doing what it was supposed to do, well…

At least it would be a fast death.

He and Kasumi reached a junction where two corridors connected and slipped smoothly into it. There, they took a moment to catch their breath. She took a look around, back the way they’d come and down both of the other corridors that slanted away from them, leading deeper into the complex. Then she settled her gaze on him.

She asked him with hand motions if he was still doing well. He responded affirmatively and that he was ready to keep going. She smiled, just for an instant, then turned towards the rightmost passageway and set off down it.

Things were different between them now, and in a great way.

It had taken some time, mostly because they were all so damn busy lately, but Kasumi had finally moved into their house. She’d brought surprisingly little, and when he’d asked her about it, she’d said she’d donated most of her stuff to people in the Pit and was viewing this as a kind of fresh start. And things were definitely different.

Kasumi was a reserved woman, but with him now, she was more open. She smiled more, she laughed more, she relaxed more. That was something he had really noticed. Kasumi always seemed tense, ready to strike or to tackle some difficult problem, no matter where she was or what she was doing. It was nice to see her relax.

It was also admittedly very nice to have her in his house and in his bed so often. Or, rather, to climb into her bed, as that was where she preferred to get intimate with him.

And hopefully they would be able to do that again tonight.

He followed her carefully down the empty hallway, the smell of oil and rust and rot surrounding them. It was accompanied by the sounds of machinery and Death Bots banging around. Ethan kept feeling the urge to look behind him but kept telling himself there was no need and he should focus on the front.

If a Death Bot was coming his way, he’d know it. They weren’t exactly subtle.

They reached the end of the hallway and stopped. Kasumi took a long, cautious look around the next room and then signaled for him to wait. He resisted the urge to sigh, they had already been crawling around this place for what felt like hours.

He thought back to the briefing, trying to comfort himself, remind himself that they had a plan and knew what they were doing.

Death Bots, which had a much more mundane name when they were invented, came from mostly automated factories built before the surface turned to ash, and a few after. They were supposed to be protectors at best, soldiers at worst. The reality of the situation ended up being that the factories just kept on rolling and pushing out killer robots, and those killer robots, without proper programming, tended to wander around and kill.

It had taken some doing, but Donovan and the Governor had finally tracked down where the local Bots were coming from. After that, they’d done a little scouting. From there, they’d brainstormed on how to deal with it.

None of the options had been good.

The initial thought had been to just bomb the place or maybe cause a cave-in, but two primary things kept them from doing that. The first was that there were a lot of resources that could be salvaged from this factory. The second was that there was the very real possibility that they would be able to initiate a kill-command that would not only allowed them to take the factory, but would also shutdown every Bot that had come from it and was still going.

Given that was the most desirable option, (especially since they were still painfully, worryingly low on certain resources), they then turned their attention to the very obvious question of: how do we do this without dying?

Because taking a Death Bot factory was a brutal, savage thing, even under the best circumstances. Donovan had initially been drafting a plan to essentially storm the place with every single Crawler backed up by a dozen security personnel.

That was when Kasumi had offered her own idea.

She’d come across references to devices that were supposed to make you invisible to the Bots. According to her, it sent out a continuous command for a thousand foot radius that forced every Bot to essentially ignore the wearer. Theoretically, they should even be able to walk right up to a Bot and slap it across its cold metallic face and be fine.

No one was willing to test that, though.

Kasumi had apparently been looking for one of these for a long time now, and had been in touch with a tech expert in another bastion who knew how to make them. She’d been piecing one together for a few months now, as apparently they were difficult to construct. She’d been keeping the information back mostly because she didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up.

Donovan had been dubious, but had ultimately given her some very rare, valuable resources from the tech vault to allow her to finish making two of them. And that was all she could make, just the two of them. Given the choice between this and an all-out assault that would almost certainly result in heavy casualties, the Captain had reluctantly gone with Kasumi’s plan.

It was a hell of a gamble, but they all trusted her and Ethan to make it happen.

Though Ethan, (and Kiva when she heard the plan), had insisted on testing them out at least once. And they had, firing up a Death Bot they’d salvaged and running a few tests. It had worked, but Ethan was still uncertain.

Regardless, he and Kasumi had been dispatched quickly.

Ember had been especially upset, given how dangerous it was, and he knew he was going to be handling her stronger emotions for the next few days at least. He felt bad, but what could he do? This was the job he had signed up for.

This was a job that needed to be done.

Kasumi signaled to him and he shadowed her out of the chamber, coming into a low, long machine shop. For whatever reason, it was dark and derelict. There were a handful of Bots around, but they looked deactivated, standing along the walls or at worktables, frozen in time.

This was going to be bad.

The place was poorly lit thanks to the fact that only the door they were coming in through and the one they had to leave through were the only things offering light. They couldn’t risk turning on their flashlights because they weren’t sure if that would draw attention, if the Bots’ programming would identify that as a problem.

Kasumi led the way into the dim tech bay. Ethan followed, struggling to maintain his silence and composure. They’d had to walk four hours just to get here because a few tunnels were collapsed, so they’d had to go almost an entire mile out of their way in the wrong direction just to get to another tunnel that would bring them back around to where they wanted to go.

They moved with great care through the machine shop, walking between two long rows of tables packed with tech and gear and tools. Even in the wan light, Ethan could identify several things that would be useful to them. This place had to be an absolute motherlode of technology and if they could get here and strip it down, it might help them for months or even years to come.

Oh crap, Ethan thought miserably.

Near the darkest central part of the room, he saw that two bots were standing almost back to back. There was enough space for Kasumi, there was probably enough space for him. He began looking around for an alternate route, as he was none too eager to get that close to a pair of Bots, and that was when the lights suddenly snapped on.

Both of them jerked in shock and it was only a lot of discipline that kept him from squeezing the trigger in surprise and fear. The Bots around them immediately came to life and began working. They were all fixing or dissecting various bits of technology.

Interesting. Apparently Death Bots were useful for more than just death. He wondered suddenly if they might be able to reprogram them...but that was a thing that had been tried before. He knew some bastions supposedly used ‘tamed’ Death Bots for security, but he also knew there were horror stories of them going rogue and killing a lot of innocent people.

Ethan had to strongly resist the urge to turn around and back out, or to say something to Kasumi. She was rigid, but facing away from him, no doubt trying to solve this new problem. He took a quick look around and saw that, unfortunately, the alternative paths were even more blocked off than this one, either by more Bots or piles of crates.

Kasumi signed to him to come closer. He stepped up beside her. For a moment, she seemed to struggle. They only had so many things they could effectively communicate with their hands. Finally, she pointed to the two Bots in front of them, then motioned for him to stay still and watch her. He nodded, curious as to what she’d come up with.

She studied the Bots closely. They were moving as they worked, their bulky metal bodies shifting to and fro, making the path between them even more dangerous. Kasumi took a step closer to them, now so close that she could reach out and touch them.

Ethan felt his entire body seize up in terror as he prepared for the worst.

Abruptly, Kasumi slipped through.

Nothing happened.

The machine shop continued buzzing and banging along as it had been. She turned around and looked at him urgently, then motioned to the two Bots. She brought her hands together, palms flat, fingers pointed up, as though she was describing how big something was. She brought her hands apart, then moved them back together.

When he didn’t respond, she did it again, a little more urgently, and suddenly it clicked.

The Bots were moving in a rhythm.

Rhythms were predictable.

He nodded and motioned for her to back up, then he took a moment to make sure everything on him was still cinched down or secure in a pocket so he would make no extra noise and have as slim a profile as possible, then he studied the Bots.

Whatever they were doing, it probably wouldn’t last, in that they would start another task and the rhythm would change. So he had to do this now. He watched as they leaned away from each other, then back towards each other. The pattern quickly became obvious, the problem was that it was going to be a very narrow gap.

Oh well, you didn’t have this job without taking risks.

Ethan stepped closer, waited, and then shoved himself through. He actually felt his chestplate brush against the back of the Bot. Then he was through and preparing to feel a cold, giant metal hand suddenly clamp onto the back of his neck and snap it with horrifying ease. That didn’t happen, however, and the relief he saw on Kasumi’s face made it obvious that it had worked.

She gestured sharply to him to follow her and he did without hesitation. A moment later, they were finally free of the tech bay. She led him into another corridor, down it, through a door and up some stairs and then into another corridor. He wanted badly to ask how much further, because that last scare had apparently knocked his mental map of the place cleanly out of his skull. He and Kasumi must’ve studied it a dozen times, but suddenly it was gone like smoke on the air.

Kasumi, however, seemed to remember just fine. She led him unerringly down the corridor, then up a second one, and finally in through a door. It led to a dusty room full of beeping, blinking pieces of tech that covered the walls in a chaotic mess. All of it seemed to be hardwired into a single big console at the back of the room.

Ethan felt relief flood him. This is what they’d been looking for.

Kasumi gestured at him to guard the door as she pulled out the data storage device. This was it, the moment of truth. Ethan waited, aiming his weapon at the door they’d just come through. While it was clear that the tech for making you invisible to a Bot worked, he was far more dubious about this particular piece of software.

Apparently the Crawlers had found the killswitch, as they were calling it, some time back. Every factory came with one, or they were supposed to anyway, but the problem was that they were small and portable and important. Which meant that they tended not to actually stay in the factories they were intended for.

And, unfortunately, you couldn’t just upload it from anywhere, it had to be in the actual factory to work properly. Ethan didn’t really understand all of it, and apparently it was too complex to try and teach him in the time they had, so they just knew that they were going to have to rely on Kasumi.

Ethan became aware of a heavy metallic stomping. There was a Bot out there somewhere, getting closer. Shit. Maybe Kasumi had tripped something, he could hear her working back there. The stomping was getting closer. Before long, he could tell it was in the actual corridor just outside the room, and it was still coming closer.

He tensed as a large shadow fell across the floor just beyond the doorway. It had been stuck open and he hadn’t wanted to bother trying to close it for obvious reasons. The Death Bot stepped suddenly into the doorway and Ethan tensed worse than ever as he covered it with his rifle. The Bot stood there, motionless, but he could hear its internal devices working.

Was this some kind of standard check or did it realize something was happening?

Or was it something else entirely?

If he didn’t know any better, he’d say the thing was confused.

Abruptly, a whirring sound inside of the Bot got louder, and then louder still. It seemed to be staring directly at him now. Ethan swallowed, breathing heavily, sweat pouring down his face now. With a jerk, the Bot raised one arm. Its hand opened up and a gun barrel appeared.

“Kasumi–” Ethan began, breaking the silence as he started to squeeze the trigger.

“Got it!” Kasumi replied.

Abruptly, the light went out of the Bot’s eyes and it froze up. All the sounds that had been coming from it ceased. All around them they heard a lot of clanking and banging, and then silence. A long moment went by.

“Fuck,” Ethan said, slowly lowering his rifle. “That was way, way too close.”

“Yes,” Kasumi agreed quietly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he muttered, eyes still locked onto the Death Bot. “So it really worked?”

“Yes, it did what it was supposed to do. They’re fried. Not just off, but fried. They aren’t coming back on. We did it, Ethan.”

“Good. Now, uh,” he stepped cautiously forward and poked at the Bot. It barely moved. He sighed. “Let’s see if we can figure out how to get around this thing.”

Lakeside Cougars Reveal!

I can finally talk about this!

So, a few years back, I began hinting that I wanted to work on a harem trilogy specifically featuring cougars, aka mature women, for those who might not be familiar with the term. Specifically mature women (usually over the age of 40) who go after noticeably younger men (usually in their 20s).

If it hasn’t become obvious by now, I really like the idea of a cougar and I have been dying to write a cougar harem. So much so that I tried it back in 2020 with Like A Fine Wine. That one didn’t really pan out and didn’t get to the heart of what I was aiming for. It had a number of issues, but the biggest problem was that it kind of felt like a copout in the sense that the women were certainly all much older than the protagonist (even the youngest was over twice his age), but because it was a sci-fi setting, they had all settled into that strange agelessness of ‘not young but not old’. All of these issues came together and ultimately resulted in that series not being what I wanted when I thought of a cougar harem.

For a while, I had ideas kicking around in my head of how I wanted to handle it. What I kept coming back to was something modern with no fantastical elements at all. But I kept stopping short, because that seemed too difficult. Not enough story, not enough action. I didn’t think I could make even a trilogy of contemporary harem.

And then Our Own Way happened in its original incarnation in 2021.

After that, I realized that not only could I do it, but people would actually like it. Especially after Our Own Way’s rewrite. I began planning this trilogy seriously in 2022 and I was intending to, well, to have it long since finished by this point. I had finally settled on a 2023 release date, and then everything went crazy in the ‘Does this title contain adult content’ Amazon fiasco. Since then, I’ve been doing bits and pieces of work on it, and I finally began getting more consistent work done this year.

So, this is what I can say about Lakeside Cougars: it will be a trilogy, there won’t be any bonus shorts (unless I get a really, really good, strong idea), it features an indie game dev as the protagonist, and I’m intending to release the first book on June 1st, 2024. Ideally, Lakeside Cougars 2 will come out July 1st, and Lakeside Cougars 3 will come out August 1st. I’m aiming for 100,000 words apiece (for reference, Our Own Way 1 & 2 were both about 100,000 words).

Below is the first chapter. I’ll be posting five chapters a week to my Patreon instead of the usual ten per week I aim for.

I hope you enjoy it!


People often associated dreams with fantasy.

Atticus had come across some variation of the phrase it was like a dream in the fiction he consumed time and time again.

Sometimes it meant something else, but the prevailing implication was a positive one.

As he hit the turn on the interstate, the one just past the sign that read LAKESIDE 2 mi. it hit.

A feeling of dreamlike unreality.

How it made him feel wasn’t something he would associate with a fantasy. As he came around that curve and saw that same landscape, shockingly unchanged from his last time here, he felt a curious dislocation settle across him.

There was the old abandoned building that might once have been a warehouse, tucked up to the edge of the forest.

There were the huge power lines, standing like monolithic metal sentinels against the skyline.

There was that same old trailer home that he always used to wonder about. Was it abandoned? Was it lived in? Was someone squatting there?

Somehow, it looked different and yet still the same. Even the crappy old pickup truck was still parked next to it.

Atticus took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, readjusting his grip on the steering wheel.

It had been about a dozen years since he’d last made this trip, and at twenty five, that meant quite literally half a lifetime ago.

As he drove on down the interstate, he suddenly wondered if this had been a good idea.

Everything about it had certainly seemed like a good idea all the way up until now. He’d been working harder than he ever had in his entire life, this was a well-earned vacation, he had everything he needed…

“Dammit,” he muttered as he almost missed his exit.

Hitting his blinker, he got off the interstate and moved down the off-ramp, coming to a stop at its end and looking around. Not a car coming or going, also just like he remembered it. They had installed a real stoplight, though.

He made a right and headed for the town.

Again, he was hit with that intense sense of…

He didn’t have a word for it.

Nostalgia was almost accurate, and certainly that was a portion of what he felt, but there was something else. Some indefinable dread, some subtle foreboding that lurked along the shadowed edges of his perception.

Its existence was more suggested than verified, and that made it all the more unsettling.

Why would he be afraid to return back to his own personal paradise?

Atticus let out a sound of inarticulate frustration as he realized that he had almost missed his next turn yet again. Slowing as he approached the first structures one would see as they approached Lakeside from the highway, he saw that they remained the same.

Pat’s Bar and the old Luna Gas Station.

He laughed softly as he pulled into the gas station, passing by the towering Luna sign with its half-moon logo.

Old and worn, but still there.

He pulled up to one of the gas pumps and killed the engine, then got out. Fishing out his wallet, he slotted his card and then set the gas to start pumping.

For a moment, he felt utterly stymied, frozen in place, unsure of what to do. As he looked around, it suddenly occurred to him that all of his experiences in this place were viewed through the lens of a youth.

He’d been in middle school the last time he was here, and the world looked so much different back then.

Maybe that’s what was throwing him off. He’d grown and changed so much, but this little slice of Oregon seemed to have remained the same.

Locked in time.

Finally, he shook it off and pulled out his cellphone.

He expected things. Missed calls, missed texts, emails, and he knew that they were there, just hidden. Today was a day of isolation, at least from most of his life. He called up his list of contacts and found Kate’s number.

I’m officially in Lakeside.

He fired off the text and waited, listening to the gas pump. To the distant sound of people talking, cars driving, some powerful piece of machinery thrumming away. Somewhere, someone was hammering away at something.

All the sounds drifted and carried over the town, everything presided over by a clear blue sky.

Atticus yawned and rubbed one of his eyes. He’d actually gotten a lot of sleep last night but he hadn’t spent four hours in the car since, well, his last time coming out here. And he’d never spent that long personally behind the wheel all in one sitting before.

He had existed almost exclusively within his home town of Hawthorne for so long now.

Why should he be spent after just four hours of sitting there driving? Well, he supposed it had required near constant focus, even if it was easy in every sense of the word. And that could be draining.

His phone buzzed. He checked it.

Great. I’ll head out now. You still remember the way there?

He felt his heart falter and his guts tremble slightly as he realized that he was actually going to be meeting Kate in the flesh again for the first time in a dozen years.

I do. I’ll be there soon.

The pump thumped as his tank finished filling, making him jump slightly. He sighed, replaced his phone, and then put the pump back.

The little screen and the number on it caught his eye and he felt that instinctive reaction of fear at seeing such a large number with a dollar sign attached to it.

It isn’t a big deal anymore, he thought and got back in the car.

A hundred bucks in gas would’ve broken him financially even a year ago. And while he was no millionaire, he could definitely afford it without any real problem. And that felt closer to fiction than the games he designed.

Atticus got back into his car and started driving.

Getting back onto Main Street (because did there exist a small town that didn’t have a Main Street?) he began making his way through Lakeside.

It was all still here.

Bargain Burgers. The gift shop. The old motel.

Damn, even the bowling alley was still there.

He’d looked that up online, because he desperately wanted to go bowling there again. The experience stuck in his head as a highlight even among the significance that his summer vacations here held. And while they’d said they were still open, he hadn’t trusted it.

But it was still there, and it even had some cars in the lot.

There was something new, though.

Farther on down the road, he saw a new building that had the vague shape of a franchised restaurant but was clearly not.

As he passed by, he saw that it was now a used book store.

A welcome addition, as far as he was concerned.

Atticus made a mental note to check that out.

But later. He wanted, needed to see the lakehouse.

Onward he drove until he hit the central nexus of the town. Not everything was all as it had once been. A Tex-Mex place he could never remember the name of was gone. One of the gas stations had been bulldozed.

He found a new feeling creeping in as he hit the primary stoplight and hooked a left onto Lake Way, the other big road in town.

That feeling was excitement. He was going to get to explore all of this, not just with new eyes, but with the knowledge that at least some of this had changed in his absence.

And then, suddenly, Lakeside was behind him.

Lake Way terminated in a brief rise that quickly gave to a gentle slope in the land.

He crested it, the road becoming Lake View Drive because right as you came up over that rise you saw it.

Bluestone Lake.

Probably the most beautiful thing to actually see in the small town. It spread out before him a few hundred yards away, and Lake View Drive was named as such only for some of that distance before it split into two and became Lake View Drive North and South.

Seeing that view: the lake, the houses, the big hill that was almost a mountain off to the left, the forest that spread out around and beyond the lake…

It awoke something of immense power within him, something that only amplified the strange feelings he was experiencing as he returned to this mythical place.

Looking to his right, he saw it: the lakehouse.

The Green House, as he and his brother had always known it.

How many dreams had he enjoyed and endured of that building?

How many times had he wished to be there, wished not to be caught in whatever wretched, godforsaken, minimum wage nightmare he currently was?

Far too many.

And now here it was. Here he was. In real life at this place again.

He saw a white four-door pulling into the driveway. Kate. It was so weird to think that she owned this operation now, but at the same time, it definitely made a certain kind of sense. She had always been so focused, so driven and intense.

Well, it was time to meet her again.

Atticus finished his drive and pulled into the driveway beside her car. Kate leaned against it, wearing a pair of sunglasses, a t-shirt, and cut-off jean shorts.

“You fixed it up,” he said, glancing at the house as he got out.

“I did,” Kate agreed happily.

“I’m still really surprised you’re in charge of it. You really made it, huh? Property manager at twenty five.”

She laughed bitterly. “No. I mean...okay, yeah, yes. But I could’ve really made it if I’d given in to the Bushmore people.”

“What all happened? If you don’t mind getting into it?” he asked.

“I don’t. You know my mom and dad owned all these lakehouses. It was really dad’s passion project. Mom...tolerated it. They were making a fair amount of money. Then he died last year. Heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I, but...weirdly, I’d mostly made peace with it by the time it came. It just-I don’t know. I knew it was coming. The way he lived his life. Just the way he looked during the last few months before it happened...I’m sorry, I’m getting too into the personal-whatever. Mom wanted to leave the town after he died, me and him were the only reason she was still here.”

“Did you have any trouble deciding how to handle the properties?”

“Not really. I agreed to split the life insurance seventy-thirty with her if I got to keep the properties. I wanted to keep the legacy going, because he’d gotten me into the business, and I like it here. Bushmore Incorporated swooped in shortly after she left and legally signed it all over to me. They offered...a lot. I still sorta kick myself for not taking it…”

“Are you happy?” he asked.

She sighed and leaned against her car, looking at the lake briefly. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I’m happy.”

“Then I think you made the right call.”

She laughed. “It’s that easy?”

“I think so.”

“Lucky for you, then. But yeah, most days I agree. Didn’t get out clean, though. There were a few debts I had to settle up, and some serious renovation work. I ended up having to sell two of the five houses anyway to make it truly work. And...one of them is your neighbor.”

“Huh,” he murmured, looking down the road to the only other house on this side of the lake.

It sat about a half-mile away. It didn’t look like anyone was home at the moment.

“What do you know about them?” he asked.

“It’s Miss Silver. Do you remember her at all?”

“No. Can’t say that I do.”

“Makes sense, she only came back to visit a few times. But she’s our town’s claim to fame. She got married like...twenty five years ago and became some bigshot romance novelist. She’s divorced now and wanted one of the lakehouses. She offered more than I was asking. She remembered my parents, liked what I was doing, I guess. So it’s hers now.”

“What’s she like?” he asked.

“She’s cool, I guess,” Kate replied, something shifting subtly in her tone.

He glanced at her. She looked a little more guarded now. Maybe their friendship wasn’t so smooth. Or maybe it was something simpler, like jealousy.

Although would someone his age be jealous of a woman twice their age?

He supposed they would be if she was a particularly hot mature woman.

Also known as: his kind of woman.

Though he seriously doubted he had any kind of a chance with a famous romance novelist.

“You want to hang out sometime?” Kate asked suddenly.

“Yeah, maybe tomorrow, or the day after. I’m...really tired,” he replied.

She nodded. “Okay. Well, you have my number. Let me know if you need anything or anything’s wrong with the house.”

“Will do. Thanks again.”

She passed him a key. “Enjoy.”

He just nodded as he accepted it.

She got into her car, backed out, and drove away.

Atticus stood there in the driveway for a long time, staring up at nostalgia personified, but made new again, like how it was in his memories, and some of his better dreams.

And worst nightmares.

Finally, taking his suitcase and laptop case from the trunk, he headed for the front door.

Goblin Girls Do It Better II Preview

Here we are with the official early access launch of Goblin Girls Do It Better II!

If you’d like to read the second chapter, you can do so right here on my Patreon if you are a 1$/month Patron.

If you would like to continue reading the whole thing as it posts, you can do so here if you are a 3$/month Patron.

I hope you enjoy!


Lucas Mead-Slayer sat on a stump in the Blackstone Forest and contemplated his life.

The view he had was a great one.

Ellasandra had told him about it, pointed out the trail that led to the hill with the hidden copse tucked away about halfway up its side. And several times over the past ten days, as he had approached the northern edge of the encampment that they were building, he had seen it. The little copse, framed so nicely by a collection of trees.

It always looked inviting.

Finally, today, he’d chosen to walk that path and see it from the other side.

The walk had been strange, and it was not until he had reached the top and sat down on the old stump and looked out over all there was to see that Lucas finally pieced together why it was so strange a walk.

He had taken it alone.

For some two weeks now, he’d more or less done nothing by himself. There was always a goblin woman at his side, and usually it was one of his wives.

Now there was a thought he’d never assumed he’d actually be able to think.

Wives.

Few settlements and most deities probably wouldn’t accept his marriage to Ellasandra, Izzy, and Talia, but he didn’t care about that at all. They were his wives and he was their husband. They loved each other and were building a life together.

That’s what mattered.

They had been going everywhere with him ever since he’d arrived. He hadn’t had a moment to himself and what he was finding was that he didn’t mind. If anything, finally being alone up here on this hill just felt bizarre and vaguely uncomfortable.

He wanted to be chatting with Ella about the village and trying to settle on a name for their first child. (She had assured him there would be more).

He wanted to be arguing with Izzy.

He wanted to be enjoying the serene peace with Talia.

Really, he would be happy with any of them. Even Nysa. Maybe especially Nysa. Though she was clearly getting more comfortable, both with him and with her life in the Vrix Tribe, they had yet to move their relationship forward in any real capacity. She was getting a little more handsy with him, flirting with him just a little, but nothing beyond that.

And he was fine with her taking her time.

They shared a kind of kinship that the others did not, and he was still parsing out why exactly that was or what it meant.

Lucas heard Ella coming long before she actually arrived on the hillside with him. He waited for her to say something when he heard her arrive, but she didn’t, hanging back.

“Everything okay, Ella?” he asked without turning around.

“...how’d you know I was here? How’d you know it was me?” she replied, approaching.

He laughed softly. “I’m an adventurer who survived in the wilderness for over a decade, Ella. If I couldn’t hear you coming I’d be dead a hundred times over by now. And by now, I know how you walk, all of you.”

“Hmm,” she said, and came to stand next to him. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Lucas replied, looking over at her. “How about you?”

“I’m fine. We’re worried about you,” she said, staring at him now.

“We as in…”

“Everyone, pretty much.” He frowned. “You’re our chieftain and husband to three of us. And all of us but Nysa are now likely pregnant with your children. We can tell when something’s bothering you, Lucas.”

“That’s a good point,” he said. “As for bothering me...I don’t know if it’s really bothering me. I don’t think that’s the right word.”

“Concerning you?” she hazarded.

“No, it’s more like...wondering if I should be concerned rather than actually being concerned.”

“What do you think you should be concerned about?”

He didn’t respond right away, instead staring out over the village again.

It was coming along nicely. There was a wall built over the cave’s entrance now, with a pair of openings for windows and a big doorway. There was also the beginnings of two huts. Nysa had begun working on hers almost immediately and Nikita knew that she’d want one for herself. It was a small operation right now, but they were only a village of nine.

Since Danica, they hadn’t managed to find anyone else still alive out there.

But given the fact that eight of them were goblins, who he had learned were every bit as prone to arguing with each other as he had been led to believe, he was impressed with what they’d managed to get done so far.

Although a disproportionate amount of that work had come from Nysa.

She had a work ethic and an endurance far surpassing any of the others.

“I guess,” he said after he’d pondered it for a while longer, “I’m wondering exactly how I feel about the fact that my life is, for sure, transitioning into something very different from what I’m used to. And I can’t just walk away from this.”

“You could,” she murmured, and sat down in his lap suddenly. “Do you want to?”

“Of course not, Ella,” he replied, hugging her. “I love you. I love Izzy. I care greatly about everyone else in the tribe. I love what we’re doing here.”

“I noticed you didn’t say that you loved your third wife,” Ella murmured.

“Talia and I are...figuring things out, still. Certainly we like and respect each other, we’re attracted to each other, but Talia...mmm. She’s not like you or Izzy, or even Nysa. She’s not like anyone else in the tribe. She’s not like most of the people I’ve met. I think she’s still adjusting to being in a tribe, and being in a relationship. We’re getting there, don’t worry.”

“That makes sense,” Ella said. “So I guess I’m still not sure what the problem is? I mean it sounds like you’ve decided how to feel about it.”

Lucas shook his head. “No, it’s more complicated than that. There are two selves within us, all of us, and they are not always united. Just because I’m happy here and I choose to stay here with you doesn’t mean my...second self is going to be happy with it.”

“I still don’t fully understand,” she murmured.

“Well…” He thought about it for a moment. “Okay, did you choose to fall in love with me? Or was it a thing that just happened to you?”

Ella began to respond, then stopped, closed her mouth. After a moment, her expression becoming more and more thoughtful, she finally turned and looked out over the village and the clearing and the forest. He waited as she thought.

Finally, she turned back. “I understand now. I didn’t choose to fall in love with you, but I chose a relationship with you. You chose to become chieftain and settle down here in this village, but your feelings about that choice might not be good, no matter how much you want them to be.”

“That’s about it, yeah,” he said. “But, to be clear Ella, I’m not pondering whether or not to leave. I’ve made up my mind: I’m staying. I’m committed. To you. To Izzy. To Talia. To this village. To our children. I know that. I’m just going through a massive change and I need...to let the dust settle, I suppose.”

She smiled and hugged him tightly. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Ellasandra.”

They sat there together for a time, basking in each other’s presence, enjoying that simple pleasure of sitting beneath a calm blue sky on a crisp fall’s day with your lover.

That ran out, however, as Lucas began to feel the pull of responsibility.

It was never far, not anymore.

Interestingly, he found that this didn’t bother him too much.

Ella got to her feet as he shifted in such way to indicate he wanted to stand. He got up once she did, lingered for just a moment to enjoy the view a little bit longer, then began walking back down the hillside with Ella.

“What’s going on today?” she asked.

“I’m going to the coast,” he replied. “I want to make another real trek through the woods, get a better feel for it, and I want to get purple bay berries for Nikita’s potion. I’m convinced that’s the final adjustment that needs to be made for it to work.”

“She’s definitely falling in love with you,” Ella murmured.

“Yeah…”

“Does it bother you?”

“No. It’s nice, to be sure. I really like her, as...rough around the edges as she is. Obviously I liked her enough to get her pregnant. I guess I just wonder if I’m going to have the time for as many relationships as seem to be forming.”

“Is it such a bad problem to have?” she asked with a grin.

He chuckled. “I mean, yes if it results in some of you getting hurt. I don’t want to be neglectful.”

“Lucas, we all understand. You are the chieftain. The new chieftain, and it is a time of war and rebuilding. You’re going to be busy. We all are, but you especially. I know we seem impatient and unreasonable a lot of the time, but most of that is just on the surface. Just how we are. Deeper down, though, we understand. For the most part.”

“So you’re saying I should dive headlong into love with everyone in the tribe?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Ella replied. “I think your second self is going to make that choice for you. You can’t say no to any of us.”

He sighed and she laughed. “You all are getting too good at manipulating me.”

“We wouldn’t be if you weren’t so obsessed with rolling around in the hay with goblin girls.”

“I can’t help that! Izzy seriously tried to tell me when we first met: goblin pussy is the best pussy. And having experienced pretty much all the other races we share the planet with, after the past two weeks, I’m now fully inclined to agree.”

“Exactly, so do it. Dive headlong into a life of horny, loving goblin wives and don’t look back,” Ella said.

He laughed as they reached the bottom of the trail and headed back towards their burgeoning village. “It’s that easy, huh?”

“I promise, we won’t make it easy.”

Lucas laughed louder. “I guess I don’t have much choice either way. You’ve all ensnared me pretty effectively.”

“Good.”

As they approached their cave, he caught sight of Talia. She was making her way out of the forest, coming back from her private residence she now spent about half her time at. The blue/green-skinned goblin woman raised something over her head when she saw them.

“I’ve got them!” she called.

“Oh finally,” Ella muttered.

“Talia’s back!” he heard Izzy cry from the cave.

There was a buzz of activity and excitement as everyone in the village gathered in the open space in front of the cave. Lucas found himself doing a quick headcount. Everyone was there. Nysa held back, looking at once both amused and a little awkward as she leaned against the natural wall with her arms crossed.

“Gather around, ladies,” Talia said as she loosened the drawstring on the small pouch she carried. “Hands out. As soon as I put it in your hand, close your fist around it.”

“I bet every last one of us is pregnant,” Izzy murmured.

“Given how much Lucas has been putting us through our paces, I’d agree,” Nikita said.

“He can’t stay away,” Kora murmured, which caused several of the others to giggle.

“I definitely can’t,” he agreed, watching Talia pass out a small, round gray stone to each goblin woman.

They all took one, save for himself and Nysa, given they hadn’t had sex. Initially, Talia said that her magical stones would be best used after two weeks, but the others had all grown too impatient. Ultimately, Talia had given in and gone back to her house this morning when she woke up to yet another litany of questions, begging to know if they were pregnant or not.

Lucas had to admit, he really wanted to know.

An intense silence fell over everyone as they waited, all of them holding their fist out in front of them, staring at it intently.

“How long?” Izzy asked finally.

“Shh,” Ella replied.

“Fuck you!”

“You’re messing it up!” Nikita snapped.

“Calm down, everyone,” Talia said. “Put your fists here, into a circle, and get ready.”

They all stepped closer and put their fists up together. Talia gave them a countdown and on zero, they all opened up their fists, palms up.

Every last one of them had a stone with a strong green glow.

“Holy shit,” Nysa muttered.

“Told you!” Izzy cried.

“All of us are pregnant?” Danica asked.

“Yes. Everyone is pregnant,” Talia replied with a small but satisfied smile on her face. She began collecting the stones back up.

“Why do you look sad about that, Kora?” Nikita asked.

“I...liked it. When Lucas was trying to get me pregnant,” she murmured.

“It’s not like we have to stop having sex,” Lucas replied.

She smiled awkwardly and blushed. “I know, it’s just...it was different when I knew we were actually...breeding. Not just doing it for fun, but actually trying to have a baby...I don’t know. There was something about it.”

“I promise that if you want to do it again, I will absolutely get you pregnant,” Lucas said. He then paused for a long moment. “Gods, all seven of you are pregnant.”

“That was the idea,” Ella replied.

“Yeah, just...in one season, you’re all going to be giving birth.”

“Right when winter should hit,” Talia said.

“Guess you’d better get your shit together before then,” Izzy said, grinning.

He sighed. “Yeah. All right, I’m going for a long walk down to the coast. I want to explore the region some more and pick some rare berries. Nikita, you told me earlier you wanted to come with me, does anyone else? Only one other person can come.”

“Aw come on, why?” Izzy complained.

“Because I need enough of you here to properly guard the place while I’m gone,” Lucas replied.

“That’s a fair point,” Ella murmured.

“Then I’m pulling rank as one of your wives,” Izzy said, stepping forward. “I want to go.”

Lucas looked around. No one else seemed to want to argue with her. He nodded.

“All right, let’s grab our stuff and get to walking.”

Beneath the Ashes 2 | Chapter 1

Welcome to the preview of Beneath the Ashes 2!

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It was finally time.

Ethan turned off the shower and for a moment simply stood there, enjoying the basic but intense pleasure of being clean.

He had forgotten just how filthy tunnel crawling ended up making you feel, despite having done it for a year beforehand. He remembered the danger, the darkness, the dread. The constant tension that originated from the knowledge that you might die, and die brutally, at any given instant. Even if you did everything right.

But that lingering sense of sweat and grime and, if you saw any kind of combat, gore splattering across your body, even if you were almost completely protected against it with a suit of survival armor, there still an intense feeling of revulsion that hung around for days or even weeks.

Pulling back the curtain to the shower stall, he grabbed a towel and began drying off.

Today was the day.

He was finally leaving the hospital.

Even though he’d only been in there for a collective four days, it felt like four weeks, given how desperately he wanted to return to this life that he was building. Even with Kiva as a roommate and Ember practically living there with them, it still felt stifling and almost claustrophobic in his room now. He finished drying off, hung up the towel, and stepped out.

Pulling on his boxers, he looked at himself in the mirror, the steam mostly dissipated.

He looked different from how he remembered, but not in any obvious way. He remembered having a similar observation about a month after he’d initially started crawling back at Refuge.

Ethan frowned. Refuge…

He hadn’t thought about it for days now.

Was that good or bad?

Should he feel guilty or relieved?

There was a gentle knock at the door behind him. “Hey, uh, can I use the shower?”

“Yeah, sure,” Ethan replied.

He began to say ‘let me just brush my teeth really quick’ when the door opened and Kiva slipped in. To say that she was comfortable around him was an understatement. She was wearing a simple robe that they’d each been provided with.

“How are you feeling?” she asked as she dropped the robe.

Ethan paused for a moment as he looked at her bare backside. Kiva was...a stunning woman. Tall, fit, and rather broad in the hips.

Which, consequently, gave her hips that could, and did, support a huge, shapely ass.

“Good,” he replied.

She started up the shower, slipped in, and closed the curtain.

“That’s good. Your back is mostly healed from what I could see. You will definitely have scars,” she said.

“Hopefully they look good,” he said as he grabbed the toothbrush and got started.

“They do,” Kiva assured him.

Even now, he genuinely could not tell if Kiva was actively trying to entice him or if she was simply that comfortable with taking her clothes off around him and also was very friendly. On the other hand, she seemed to have some measure of difficulty interacting in a way that felt natural with anyone but him or Ember.

He was still figuring her out, but it was not an unpleasant experience.

While she showered, he finished brushing his teeth and then headed out into their shared recovery room. Ember had brought him a fresh set of clothes that she had bought with his pay from the last mission. That one had paid out big time, five times the normal amount given how insanely dangerous it was and how messed up he’d gotten as a result of it. He pulled on a simple, black formfitting t-shirt, black socks, and a pair of black cargo pants, surprised by the quality of it all. He was lacing up some dark gray boots when Ember came back.

“Hey...wow,” she murmured.

“What?” he asked, glancing over at her.

“You just...look better in those than I thought you would.”

He looked down at himself. “You like black clothes I take it?”

“Well, I like you wearing black clothes, apparently.” She glanced at the closed bathroom door. “So...did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Her? Did you have sex with Kiva?”

“What? No. I told you I wanted all of us to have a serious discussion about that.” Ethan finished tying his boots and stood up.

“I said I was fine with it,” Ember replied. “And Kiva seems pretty happy with the idea.”

“I know. I just want to sit down, all three of us, and have an actual discussion about it. Because it isn’t just sex that’s on the table, it’s our lives. Kiva seems to like it here and has been indicating she wants to live here. I feel like we’ve all been sort of cautiously batting around the idea of asking her to move in with us.”

“Well, yeah...I mean we’re doing that, right? I thought that was obvious at this point,” Ember replied.

“See? Right there. Exactly why all of us need to directly speak on the subject. We’re clearly not on the same page,” he said.

She pursed her lips, then nodded. “That’s a good point.” She smiled and stepped up to him suddenly, carefully hugging him to her. “I’m so glad I get to have you back. I slept in our shack by myself for weeks without much of a problem but now I can barely tolerate it. I have nightmares now that you’re gone.”

“I’m sorry, babe,” he murmured, kissing the top of her head and just taking a moment to enjoy her. Her feel, her scent, her voice. Just her presence. “How’s Hop?”

She laughed softly. “It’s a little hard to tell, but I think he misses you. He’s certainly been more vocal since you left.”

“Well hopefully he’ll calm down once I get home. Speaking of home, did you get the new bed in?” he asked.

“Yes. I went to the Market yesterday and it was delivered this morning. I put it together and I ended up giving our other bed to a couple who just arrived in the Pit not too long ago. They seemed pretty desperate, so I didn’t charge them anything for it,” she replied. “I figured that’s what you’d want me to do.”

“It is. That makes me happy. That’s another thing you and I, and I guess Kiva if she wants to live with us, needs to actually discuss: our goals with helping the people in the Pit.”

Ember smiled broadly as she stepped back and looked up at him. “I’ve been speaking with Lena about that. She’s very excited. She wants to help us.” She slowly lost her smile. “She didn’t seem to fully believe that we were going to help.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I asked her. She said what has happened, without fail in her experience, is that those who survive joining the Crawlers move out of the Pit almost immediately. Sometimes they’ll help out, sometimes they’ll stick around for a bit, but inevitably, they all leave, and they forget about the people in the Pit. It’s happened every single time. So, naturally, she’s skeptical. Though she wanted me to tell you that she didn’t think poorly of you or me,” Ember explained.

“I’ll be happy to break the cycle.”

They both glanced over as the shower shut off.

“Did you at least see her naked?” Ember murmured.

“You are perverted, you know that?” he replied. She crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. He sighed, then laughed. “Yes. Her ass.”

“And?”

“Probably the best ass I’ve ever seen. Except for yours.”

Ember rolled her eyes. “I know you love me, you don’t have to tell me I’m the best at everything. I don’t need to be coddled.”

He laughed. “Yeah, unless you’re feeling oh so delicate and whine about every little thing if you get woken up in the morning.”

“I’m not a morning person!”

“I noticed.”

Ember growled and grasped his shirtfront. She had to stand on her toes to raise herself up so they were face to face.

The bathroom door opened up and Kiva walked out wrapped in a towel. She paused as she saw them. They both looked over at her.

She smiled and sat down on her bed. “Don’t mind me.”

Ember sighed and let go of him, a small smirk on her face. “Just get ready,” she said. “I’m fucking starving.”

“Yeah, all right,” Ethan replied.

When she turned around, he smacked her ass. She whipped back around and stared at him, her cheeks turning red.

“Yes, dear?” he asked.

She stared at him for a few seconds longer, then her eyes cut quickly to Kiva, who was still watching them with what appeared to be great amusement. “Just get your shit,” she muttered finally.

Ethan laughed and gathered up his clothes. Kiva stood and moved only somewhat behind the curtain that separated their beds. She dropped the towel and then began to dress. Ethan saw Ember take a long look at her.

At some point over the past few days, something had shifted in their relationship. Something he liked. Ember was a very tough woman, and he had been glad to see that it hadn’t hardened her or turned her cruel. But it had begun manifesting in a more...surly personality. It was a trait that he was finding he rather enjoyed in his women.

Of the dozen or so women he’d gotten together with over the course of his life, (almost all of them one or two night encounters), the ones who lingered were the confident ones with a touch of attitude. There was just something about women who weren’t afraid to fuck with him, just a little, (or a lot sometimes).

“All right,” Kiva said, emerging from her poorly concealed changing space, “I’m ready to go, too...are we still all going somewhere together?”

“Yes,” Ethan replied. “I want to swing by our place to drop off my spare clothes and to see Hopper for a little bit, and then I want to take you both out to dinner.”

“Hopper?” she asked. “Oh! Right, your pet...bug. Cricket?”

“Cave cricket, yeah,” Ember replied.

“I’m happy with this plan,” Kiva said.

Ethan thought she was a little anxious, which made sense. They’d sort of just batted around the idea of what they were going to do after getting out of the hospital. He’d been fucked up enough on morphine through most of it that he didn’t remember half the conversations the three of them had had.

The thing he remembered the most was that Ember had fucked him yesterday when his back had finally healed enough and though she hadn’t watched (as far as he knew, maybe she had), Kiva had at the very least been in the room listening.

Ethan led them out of the patient room, glad to be free of it, and began navigating the hospital, following the signs towards the main entrance. He had admittedly been sorely tempted to ask Kiva if she wouldn’t mind coming over to his bed for the night. Ember’s beauty was staggering to him and her personality meshed pretty well with his own, but Kiva gelled with him in a different way and her own physical attributes were...deeply alluring.

He loved tall women. He loved built women. And he had discovered that he apparently had a particular love of short blonde hair.

And he had dreamed at least twice of fucking her doggystyle so far.

Her ass really was the best he’d ever seen in his life.

But it didn’t seem right to ask it yet and neither of them had really been in proper condition for it anyway.

Plus, fucking in a hospital bed actually wasn’t all that fun.

Well, okay, it was, but fucking in a bed at home was preferable.

They arrived at the front desk a few moments later and, as soon as they did, a vaguely familiar person hopped up out of their chair.

“Ethan,” he said, walking over.

“Yes?”

“I’m Xander. Security for Crawler HQ. Captain Donovan sent me to speak with you. Are you and Kiva in fighting shape?”

“Yes,” Ethan replied, glancing at Kiva.

“I am, yes,” she said.

In truth, he was still sore and in some pain, but the accelerated healing agents had done their job and the doctor had given them both a clean bill of health.

“Good. Ethan, Donovan wants you to report to Crawler HQ tomorrow at eight AM sharp. Kiva, if you are still interested in joining the Crawlers, then he would like you to be there as well. He would also like to apologize for not managing to visit you again, but he has been extremely busy. We all have. And we could use your help.”

“I’ll be there,” Kiva said.

Ethan nodded. “We’ll be there on time.”

“Good. I have to go.”

Xander about faced and walked out of the hospital.

Ethan felt a cold stone settle somewhere deep in his guts. He’d been more or less disconnected from the world while he’d been recovering. Ember had been telling him a few things, but for the most part, her world was limited to the Pit right now, and they had their own problems.

Had something else gone wrong?

Ethan and Kiva both quickly pressed their thumbs to a tablet, confirming they were being discharged, and headed out of the hospital.

One way or another, he would find out, and soon.

Our Own Way 3 Preview

Here we are at the beginning of the third Our Own Way novel.

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“Don’t say it,” Gabe murmured as he finished clipping his nails.

“Say what? And how did you even know I was here?” Ellen replied, stepping into the doorway behind him.

“I can hear you. Both in general and your thoughts,” he said, studying his nails, then replacing the clipper. He stepped in front of the mirror again and studied himself. “You know I never used to do anywhere near this level of prep before,” he added quietly.

“I believe it. Most men don’t,” Ellen replied, stepping into the bathroom and putting her hands on his shoulders. “Trust me, it’s appreciated. And I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“Right. You weren’t thinking ‘he really needs to relax’ or anything like that.”

She laughed softly, then grew a little more serious. “Actually, I genuinely was not thinking that. You’re pretty relaxed. Or, maybe relaxed isn’t the right word. Confident. Calm. You don’t seem worried.”

“Well, I am,” he said, “although admittedly not as much as I’d be if this was a week or two ago.”

“Four days ago you were doing this exact same thing to go take a cougar on a date. You were more nervous then.”

“It’s not quite the same,” he murmured. Finally, he looked up at her reflection. “So what were you thinking, then?”

“That I was right. When we first started talking, my assessment of you ultimately ended up being that beneath your...cautious exterior was a mostly untapped reservoir of confidence.”

“And you tapped it, huh?”

“Oh yes. I very much tapped it. And Holly has helped a lot. You are more confident now, Gabe.”

“I guess it’s finally catching up.” He looked down at himself once more. “Should I do more?”

Ellen opened her mouth, then paused, closed it for a moment, and smiled. “What do you think?”

“I think...no. I think I’m good.”

“Why?”

“Anymore and it starts heading into try hard territory, I think, for Chloe. Any less and I worry about heading into ‘I’m too good for you’ territory, which isn’t the message I want to send for obvious reasons.”

Ellen’s smile grew and she looked very satisfied. “That’s basically what I was going to say.”

“Interesting.” He turned around and looked up at her, settling his hands on her broad hips. “That being said, I would like to know if I’m missing anything obvious.”

“Hmm.” She looked him up and down. “No. Wait! Yes. One thing. Put on your cologne.”

“For real?”

“Yes. Trust me. You want to give her a scent to associate you with, a good one. And that cologne is just...oh my. So good,” she replied.

He thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah, that tracks. Although what if she’s already been around someone who uses this?”

“That’s just a thing we’ll have to risk, and this seems kind of obscure.”

“It had better be,” he muttered as he sprayed some on. “After spending two damn hours hunting it down.”

“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad. And it was...ah, mmm. Yeah. So very worth it. That is actually making me horny right now. Because I smell it and I think of you.”

“Well...good for me then.”

“Very good for you. Now...I do have one piece of advice.”

“I’m listening.”

“Chloe is a ten out of ten. She’s kind of the definition of a big titty goth girl and she is a gamer. She’s a smoke show. She is obviously, to some extent, aware of this fact. And you feel like she is out of your league. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

“You aren’t wrong,” Gabe replied.

“So then, I advise that you...put this out of your mind. Which I know sounds like advice I always give, but this time it’s a little different. I think Chloe wants to go on a date with a guy who won’t worship at her feet, but also won’t make her feel like she should be lucky for the opportunity...pretty much, what you were saying earlier, but applied to the whole thing.” She paused, then sighed and shook her head.

“Okay, I’m a little high right now so it’s a little harder to hold onto my thoughts. Um. Okay. Don’t laugh at me!”

“I’m not!”

“You’re smirking. That’s like laughing. Anyway. Basically, be yourself, treat her like you treat us, and uh...fuck it. You know what to do. Go treat that girl to a good date. She needs it,” Ellen said.

“I can do that,” Gabe replied.

Ellen looked at him for a moment, then hugged him. “I’d make some quip about how you’re all grown up but I think that’d be kinda weird given our relationship...unless you’re into that.”

“Uh...no comment,” he replied.

Her eyes flashed. “Wait what?”

“What’s going on?” Holly called from the bedroom. “What’s Gabe into?”

“Nothing that I feel like discussing,” he replied firmly.

“Boo! I wanna do weird, freaky shit with you!”

“Oh believe me,” he said as he and Ellen stepped out of the bathroom and he poked his head into the bedroom, “you will. Now that things are finally settling down a little, we are going to start experimenting with the part of you that enjoys being held down.”

“Really?” she asked, setting her laptop aside and sitting up.

“Oh yes,” Ellen agreed. “We’re going to do a bit more than hold you down.”

“When!?”

“Soon,” Gabe replied. He began to say something else and then Holly shifted and the blanket fell away from her, revealing her considerable and bare breasts. He stared at her for a moment before sighing. “I have to get out of here or I’m never going to leave.”

“Oh really?” Holly asked, grinning at him. “You want little old me over your shiny new goth girlfriend?”

“First of all, I love you. A lot. Second of all, she’s not my girlfriend and you are. Third...um…”

“Third is that he’s distracted by whatever tits are in his face,” Ellen said. “And you’re right, Gabe. You should go because if you don’t you’re going to pull us into a threesome because we have such a hard time saying no to you and you’ll make Chloe very grumpy.”

“I wouldn’t want her grumpy at me,” Holly murmured.

Gabe laughed. “Yes you would.”

Holly crossed her arms. “No, I wouldn’t. She’s not into girls. Which is fine, just...disappointing. She’s so fucking hot. I’m kinda jealous.”

“Same,” Ellen agreed.

“Okay, okay, you both are right.” He marched over to the bed, leaned down, and kissed her on the mouth. Then hesitated and cupped one of her big, pale breasts.

Holly giggled and rolled her eyes. “Gabe. Come on,” she murmured. “Don’t start what you can’t finish.”

“Dammit,” he whispered. “I love you.”

She smiled and touched his cheek. “I love you too, Gabe. Now go have fun.”

“Yes, dear.”

Holly laughed and shook her head, then picked up her laptop as he straightened back up. He could tell from a glance at her screen that she was working on her pictures again. She hadn’t just gotten into the world of photography, she’d dived in headfirst and happily, and he couldn’t be happier for her. She was obviously enjoying herself immensely.

Gabe rejoined Ellen and they walked into the living room. He started getting into his shoes.

“What are you gonna do?” he asked.

“I am going to get a little more baked, and then I am going to marathon a cartoon from the nineties that I used to be very, very into it, completely forgot about, and just recently rediscovered. Now that it’s official and I no longer have a job and I have actual time for myself, I’m catching up on a lot of media that I had to abandon or ignore. So I’m making a pizza and bingeing that shit,” she replied.

Gabe pulled his hoodie into place and gave her a hug and a kiss. “Okay then. Have fun and I love you. Let me know if you need or want anything.”

She smiled that smile of hers. “So if I want a foot massage or something…”

He sighed. “You know what I mean. And you know better.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, you do.”

She laughed. “Yeah, don’t worry, I’m not going to fuck with you. Go pound a hot goth girl.”

“Hopefully. I’m not sure if she wants sex or not.”

“I’m pretty confident she wants it, but yes, that is a possibility to keep in mind. I love you too, babe. Have fun.”

Gabe kissed her once more and then headed out to his car. As he did, he glanced at the sky and sighed heavily. He could see his breath on the air. It was already pitch dark now, the stars coming out. It was five in the afternoon.

Shaking off the bad feelings that were trying to worm their way into his skull, he got behind the wheel, set his GPS to Chloe’s apartment, and started driving.

Although it had been ten days since he’d last seen Chloe, (and first made love with her), it felt like longer. He knew some of that came from the fact that it had snowed lightly a few more times, prompting them to pretty much just chill out in their house.

Besides hanging out with Ellen and Holly, and working on his next project, the biggest thing of note he’d done was go on a date with Isabella a few days ago. Spending the night with a recently divorced cougar who was amazing with her mouth had been a study in unusual but blissful wonder.

The whole experience had been odd, but in a good way. For being very smart, very accomplished, and very attractive, Isabella had been surprisingly lacking in confidence. But Ellen had made a really good point when she’d told him: Imagine being with the same person for twenty five years and then suddenly breaking up and trying to date again, even casually.

Overall, it had been a great time, and he was hoping that she would ask him on another date. He was reluctant to ask mostly because she was so busy, between being a surgeon and dealing with the aftermath of her divorce as she tried to get her life rearranged.

In truth, Chloe had been on his mind more than anyone or anything else. (Outside of his relationship.)

He hadn’t seen her once since they’d had sex and they’d been texting a little. Mostly he’d been giving her space, because that’s what she wanted. He was also wondering if maybe they’d gone too far too fast. Not even just that they’d fucked, (twice), but that they had fucked in front of about half a dozen people, all of them mostly strangers to Chloe.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, and so far nothing she’d said or done had actually strongly indicated that she was freaked out by what had happened, but he was still paranoid. He was a lot less so right now, though, and he felt a bit of weight lifting as he drove through the dark, frigid city.

Chloe had called him up half an hour ago and pretty much out of the blue said she wanted a relaxing date night with him because she was incredibly stressed out. Given he’d been practicing a lot lately in helping women manage their stress levels, and the fact that he wanted to see her again, he’d immediately agreed to come over.

He found himself thinking back to Ellen’s assessment as he pulled into the apartment’s parking lot. It felt...off.

It didn’t seem possible that he could have had this level of confidence back when they’d first met, let alone before that.

There was a parking spot. He supposed this was something he was going to have to wrestle internally with later.

He began to pull out his phone but as soon as he parked, the front door to Chloe’s building opened up and she started walking over. She was wearing a long, dark coat and a dark beanie and what looked like heavy dark boots. As she approached, she paused once and squinted into the window, then walked over and got into the passenger’s seat.

“Hey...how you doing?” Gabe asked, because he could tell immediately she was in a sour mood still.

Her text had been: Come save me from my anger before I break something. Or someone.

“I’ll just warn you right now that I’m feeling extra bitchy and not in a fun way,” she replied, staring out the front windshield as she dug around in one pocket. Finally, her hand came out with a USB stick. “Can we listen to this? It will calm me down.”

“Sure,” he replied, pulling his own out of the radio.

“Thank you. Seriously,” she muttered, reaching forward, then hesitating. “Don’t make fun of me for this.”

“I won’t,” he replied.

“...thanks.”

She put the USB in and then fiddled with it for a moment. Instrumental music soon began playing. It struck him as very fantasy sounding.

“Where are we going?” he asked, his phone out.

“There’s a place called Slices I would really like to go to right now,” she replied.

He punched it into his GPS and then showed her the most likely result. “This?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.” He set it up and then started backing out.

Goblin Girls Do It Better Preview | Chapter I

Okay, here we are with the goblin girl story!

Chapter I is below.

Chapter I & II are here for 1$/month.

More chapters will be posted here for my 3$/month Patrons.

Enjoy!


Lucas was just beginning to hunt for a place to make camp for the night when he heard the scream.

It was high-pitched, almost certainly coming from a woman, and was the kind of short scream that conveyed immense, and unpleasant, surprise.

He was just cresting a small hill when it came to him, and though he could not see the person who’d screamed, he saw the chipped dark brickwork of a ruin peeking at him through the trees off to the southeast. Though he had never seen the dark masonry with his own eyes until just that moment, he knew what he was looking at.

Lucas sprinted down the hill, making for the treeline.

He’d like to say that he did it for the sole reason of wanting to save someone from a potentially dangerous situation, but the truth of the matter was that he was feeling impulsive. Perhaps dangerously impulsive.

Hitting the base of the hill, he ran on, booted feet pounding the grass, trampling flowers and breaking through small bushes as he tried to get an idea of what he might be facing. He had a vague sense of motion somewhere in front of the dark structure, and when he hit the forest, he saw the sparks of clashing metal.

Someone was definitely fighting.

“Incoming!” he shouted as he drew his blade.

Both figures seemed to be rather short but that didn’t really matter. What did matter was that one of them was noticeably bonier than the other. He burst through the treeline and into a small clearing in front of the crumbling ruin.

He was greeted with the sight of a goblin woman in a traveling dress fighting a losing battle against what seemed to be a fully armed and armored dwarven undead. She shrieked and ducked under a huge battleaxe as it came for her face.

Lucas considered the situation for about two seconds before he began running forward as fast as he could once more. He screamed an inarticulate battlecry, which caused the dwarven zombie to twist in his direction.

He launched himself feet first directly into the creature.

The goblin woman shrieked again, this time in what he swore sounded like delight, as his boots made contact, dented and then broke the old rusted armor, kept going, and smashed the skeletal thing into its base components.

Lucas landed with a heavy grunt on his back, then groaned as a bone hit him on the forehead. He rolled, twisted, and scrambled back up onto his feet. Where there was one undead, there were almost certainly more.

But as the bones and old armor finished scattering across the clearing, a few clattering against the front of the old structure, he saw and heard nothing.

“That was amazing!” the goblin woman cried, shattering the silence.

Lucas turned to face her and was struck by two things: her lack of armor and her incredible beauty.

The third thing he noticed was the way she was looking at him. Her eyes were wide and she had a massive smile on her face.

“Thanks,” he replied, brushing at his blade before sheathing it. “You...look very out of place here.”

“Because I’m a goblin?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No, because you’re wearing a...dress,” he murmured, trailing off as she shifted and one of the straps came loose and he saw most of her chest.

“Oops,” she said, smirking and putting it back in place. Then she sighed in real frustration as she realized that it was cut through. “How in the three hells did he even do that!?” she snarled, trying fruitlessly to get it back in some semblance of working order.

“That was a really close call,” Lucas replied, feeling a lot of very specific things as he watched her work.

Whoever she was, this goblin girl was very...blessed, in certain areas of her body.

With another sigh, she abruptly regained her smile as she snapped her eyes back to him. She twisted so that her shoulder was closer, presenting it.

“Can you help?”

“I can definitely help,” Lucas replied, coming over and leaning forward. She had to be over a foot shorter than him, but that made sense given her race. “Who are you?”

“My name is Izzy,” she replied.

“Izzy…” Ellasandra had told him of a best friend named Izzy, but how many goblin girls had the name of Izzy? Probably a lot. “Good to meet you,” he said as he finished tying the torn strap back together and putting in place. He straightened up. “I am Lucas Mead-Slayer.”

“That sounds familiar,” she muttered.

“My name has...gotten around,” Lucas replied.

“No, I don’t really know any famous humans,” she said, frowning in concentration. “I don’t actually know any humans, but I know of a few humans. And–” Her brilliantly pink eyes widened. “Are you Ellasandra’s human!?”

Lucas chuckled. “Yeah, you could say that...I can’t believe you’re that Izzy. I’m looking for Ellasandra. What in the gods’ names are you doing here? My map tells me Blackstone Forest is still a day or so away.”

“It is,” Izzy replied, eyeing him much more closely, with a great interest, now. “I’m coming back from a journey. A failed one, I might add. And that’s actually why I’m here.” She turned to glare at the dark stone structure. “I was hoping to recover something useful from this old pile of stone.”

“You have to know these old dwarven ruins are almost always guarded or infested by undead, right?” Lucas replied.

She heaved an annoyed sigh. “Yes, Lucas, I know that. Not all goblins are stupid.”

“I didn’t say–”

“I’m good at sneaking,” she continued, and he could see a very specific smile creeping slowly onto her beautiful green face. “And I thought maybe I could get in, grab something, and get out before any of the creepy bastards were the wiser. Only this one was right past the door.”

“Uh-huh,” Lucas replied.

A moment passed. A wind gusted through the trees, making them dance and sway. Somewhere, a bird called loudly, and another answered.

A mating call.

“So…?” Izzy asked, and he saw that she had not only leaned forward, exposing her already well-shown cleavage even more, but now she was swaying slowly back and forth.

“So what?” he replied.

“You gonna help me?”

“You don’t even know me,” he said.

“Hmm. I guess that’s a good point. You could just be lying about knowing Ellasandra...oh! All right, pull down your pants.”

“What?”

“Let me see your left hip,” she said.

That resonated in his head for a moment and abruptly he latched onto why. “Ah...she told you about that.”

“About your thigh scar? Yes. Lemme see and I’ll know it’s you,” she replied, smirking now.

He sighed, undoing his belt. “All right.”

Izzy stepped much closer as he pulled the left side of his pants down. She knelt down and studied his thigh. He waited. She kept studying. He could feel her breath against his bare skin.

“Well?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” she murmured. He heard her shift and suddenly felt her hands digging in between his pants and his leg.

“Izzy!”

“What!? I need to be sure!” she replied, tugging on his pants, then she laughed.

He sighed and, with a tremendous amount of restraint, he pulled up his pants and belted them again. “You sure now?”

“Yeah,” she murmured, still on her knees.

She looked up at him, and expectant smile on her face, then she looked disappointed when he asked, “What now?”

Izzy sighed and got to her feet. “Well, Lucas, Slayer of Mead, would you be so good as to accompany an innocent, defenseless goblin girl into the big scary ruin so that I don’t come back completely empty-handed?”

“You are not innocent,” he muttered.

“What was that?” Izzy asked immediately, trying, and failing, to stare him down.

He stared back at her, then smiled. He couldn’t help it. There was something about her, something that Ellasandra had complained about many, many times, that brought out what some might call the worst in him.

“You aren’t innocent, Izzy. Not after all I heard about you.”

“What absolute nonsense did you hear from Ella about me!?” she snapped.

“All the tricks you played on her. The pranks and the goofs. And all the time you spent ensuring that Kora was clean,” he replied. Ellasandra had told him that a lot too.

Izzy immediately stiffened and then reddened in the face. “Yeah, well, I won’t apologize for any of it,” she fired off eventually.

“I wasn’t looking for an apology. That being said, I believe you about the defenseless part,” he said.

Her expression immediately changed into one of excited challenge. “I could kick your ass. Any time, any day, human!”

He almost, almost, challenged her then and there. He knew she’d take it, she wanted it, and that he wanted it, too. But he felt certain he knew what it would lead to before too long of them rolling around in the dirt together.

And this was an unsafe place.

“Don’t tempt me,” he said finally.

“Oh please, please be tempted,” Izzy shot back, grinning more broadly than ever as she leaned forward again.

He actually felt himself tremble. How long had it been? He knew exactly how long it had been. Nine months and almost one day.

Way past way too long.

“I am,” he said as he got control of himself, “but this isn’t the place for it.” Izzy stared at him for a moment longer, then something inside of her actually seemed to agree with him, and she lost her lusty look. It was replaced by an annoyed and vaguely angry one.

“You’re right,” she muttered glumly.

“Are you serious about going in there?” he asked, looking again to the stone structure.

Now that he was closer, he saw that it was built fairly deeply into a hillside. The earth crept up along its side and over its roof, and where it ended, vines crawled along the brickwork and clung like lifeless snakes. Though the structure still seemed sound, cracks and decay were obvious all over its face.

He’d still never heard a sure answer about the true age of these places.

“I am serious,” she said. “I don’t want to disappoint Ella more than I’m already going to.”

“Well, all right. I know I can handle zombies, especially if they’re this far gone,” Lucas said, nudging the nearest bone with his boot.

“Perfect! Let’s go find some treasure!” Izzy declared.

“Wait, you should probably stay out here.”

“No! I want to go inside!” she replied, surprisingly petulant. Although Lucas had to admit, he was hearing exactly what he’d heard from Ellasandra on her worse days, when what she called her ‘inner goblin’ escaped more easily.

“Izzy–”

“You don’t take me seriously! I can defend myself!” she snapped.

“I’m not saying that you can’t, Izzy. I fought alongside Ellasandra for a year, I know what goblins can do. I’m saying you have no armor.” He paused. “You also appear to have no traveling pack. And no weapon.”

“Oh. Um. Yeah,” she murmured sheepishly. “I...lost my travel pack yesterday.”

“How?” he asked, genuinely curious. That was a fairly big deal for a traveler.

She giggled awkwardly. “I was climbing a tree. For...reasons. That aren’t important. And one strap on my pack had already broken, so it was laying awkwardly, and then, well, it fell off me. Into a ravine. With a river.”

“Uh-huh. And how about you weapon?”

Here she stopped meeting his eyes, blushing again. Though, he imagined, for a different reason. “I got angry and threw it...down another ravine.”

“...all right, wow,” he muttered.

“Shut up!” she growled, crossing her arms.

“Fine, fine. I won’t say anything. I guess I’ve done some pretty stupid shit when I was pissed before. I am suggesting it for your safety, though. I will go inside and investigate.”

Izzy gave him a calculating look. He waited. His experience with Ellasandra, and a few others, had taught him that goblin trust was hard won. Though they were often quick to trust each other, too often in his opinion, the opposite was typically true for outsiders. And humans most certainly counted as outsiders.

Which was why he was honestly shocked that Izzy was talking to him in such a familiar, open manner.

Ellasandra must have told her a lot about their time together and really imprinted a sense of trustworthiness on his image.

“I still want to go inside, but not because I think you’ll rip me off, but because I...have reasons,” she said, not quite looking at him again.

“Reasons, huh?” he asked.

“Yes! Reasons! Lucas! Can I have my reasons!?” she snapped.

He chuckled. “Yes, Izzy, you can have your reasons. All right. Just...stay behind me, run if there’s real trouble, and do as I say.”

“Make me,” she replied. He began to sigh and she quickly cleared her throat. “Sorry, I’m, uh-that just slipped out. I’m listening, I’ll do as I’m told.”

“Thank you. Now let’s do this.”

Shelter From the Storm Preview | Chapter 1

This is probably a bit of a surprise. I’ll admit it kind of was to me too.

So what is this?

Being an author, I sometimes am struck by ideas. Sometimes they seem incredibly potent for about a day or two, then fizzle out. Sometimes they unfold like a galaxy in motion, intricate and perfect. I’m better about telling which is which nowadays, but it’s still tough.

Back in May, this idea came to me. This idea of a war hero living in a post-apocalyptic future where his side is trying to put the world back together after a brutal fifty year war overthrowing a fascist, dystopian government. The first thing that I knew about this character was that he was suicidal and full of self-loathing and he was very tired of being alive, but didn’t really want to die. I knew right away this would be a terrible idea for the protagonist of a haremlit novel. Basically every author I’ve spoken with about it has told me the same thing.

And yet.

And yet as I began sketching an idea of the plot, I simply could not remove these aspects of the protagonist. They seemed intrinsic to the narrative. And then I started writing, and the first few chapters just sort of vomited out of me in the way that stories do sometimes in the beginning. It’s a great experience, honestly one of the ones I as an author lives for.

But I had other responsibilities. Finishing Raw. Launching Our Own Way. Getting started on Beneath the Ashes. Absolutely panicking over the Amazon thing.

Somehow, though all of that, I managed to put together about five chapters of content and a vague outline. And then it went dormant for a while. I didn’t even look at it for like a month at least. Then, just recently, I took a look back over everything I’d written on a whim, and still felt a strong sense of having something, and I started writing a bit more. By coincidence, Patreon finally created their Collections feature, which allows you to more effectively collect chapters of a story into a single, coherent location.

Finally, I decided that I might as well begin posting this, even though it’s going to be in the background, and I might go weeks or longer without getting a chance to update it. Partially I made this choice to help fill out the 3$/month Tier, and partially because I want to experiment with it. It’s very possible that having an audience for a title while it’s being written might help motivate me more. And I mean in a different way than I already do with how I write. So far, I’ve only posted stories as I’m writing them when I’m positive I’ll be finishing them within a fairly small window of time. This has no real end date.

Which is good, because it’s a passion project. I imagine this will not have mass appeal. That being said, it is functionally a haremlit story. There’s a guy, running missions in a post-apocalyptic world, falling in love with at least three women. There’s really nothing different there. Honestly, in some ways, it closely resembles most of my other works. But I’m going to be leaning a lot more into my miserable protagonist than ever before. I also will say that this is probably the most personal thing I’ll have ever written. If it isn’t obvious by now, I have problems. Mental health problems. Even medicated, educated on the subject, and with a few years of therapy under my belt, my mental health still often gets wrecked by my depression and anxiety problems. They are lifelong tormentors. In some way that I cannot articulate, writing Shelter From the Storm seems somehow…necessary, to me personally.

For obvious reasons this isn’t going to be a blow-by-blow of my own mental health problems. Clearly I’m not a war hero living in the shadow of taking down a dystopian, fascist global government. But a lot of my troubles went into this. What and how much? I’d rather not say. My primary goal for this is to help both myself and, ideally, other people. I don’t know if it will be cathartic or helpful in any conceivable way for people who are also suffering under the tyranny of depression and anxiety, but I can hope.

Anyway, here’s chapter one.

You can read chapter two here.

And future chapters will be posting here if you are a 3$/month or above Patron.


It was raining when I finally found Harper Station.

Given the fact that rainstorms had a fifty-fifty shot of drilling a migraine deep in the dark depths of my skull, I took this as something of a mixed blessing.

It had been nothing but me and the bramble and eighty goddamned pounds of gear for seventy goddamned miles.

Not exactly what I’d call a hike.

I was just starting to think I was lost again, half-prepared to hurl my cracked compass into the nearest pond, when I finally crested one green hill that looked like pretty much any other and suddenly there it was.

What had, up to this point, been nothing for me beyond a scribble on a faded, coffee-stained map, was now in my field of vision. I took a moment to check the immediate area for signs of what we argued over whether or not to call ‘life’ and also get my breath back.

Even with all my training, all the exercise required to stay alive in an apocalyptic hellscape, this had still been a damned long walk.

I was alone, though, and Harper looked desperately inviting.

For a moment I just stared at it. From this far away, it was little more than a dozen buildings, few of them larger than a shack, placed within four fifteen-foot walls. They were good walls. I could tell that even from this distance.

Big and sturdy and gunmetal gray, scratched, scored, and scarred by life this far out in the bramble.

I could just barely make out some shapes moving among the structures. I pulled my scope from its slot and put it to my eye. I studied the people that the vague shapes resolved into. My knowledge of Harper was slim at best. Before booting my ass out here, my former commanding officers had been reluctant to give me much hard data.

Couldn’t blame them. After fifty years of almost total, constant warfare with a dystopic nightmare of a state, paranoia was going to be a way of life for a long, long time to come. The big men with the iron fists and the gasmask armies were dead now, finally, but even five years later, we were still living in the shadow of their industrial conquest.

If I was very lucky, my grandchildren might possibly live to see the Earth of old, back before the haze and the monsters and the weather.

The great battle scars that had ripped the land asunder in some places, salted the earth in the others, and, in the worst of cases, irradiated it all straight to hell.

My rangefinder found one particular face standing atop a second story deck, issuing orders to a few others down on the ground.

Hmm. This was almost certainly Commander Caspian. She looked sure and stern enough in her smart gray outfit, black hair pulled into a simple but neat ponytail. She looked up and I saw that she had one glaringly white eye.

While I was trying to determine what her other eye color was, she suddenly looked dead at me.

For a moment we were locked, staring at each other from across a good half-mile of open space. I wondered what she’d do. She knew I was coming, we’d spoken on the radio on my way here. Only twice though, thanks to interference from the shitty weather.

Suddenly she was moving, ducking back halfway into an open door behind her. She came out with a sniper rifle and had it to her shoulder, scope to her eye, in a blink. I just managed to drop back down before a round came scorching over my head.

Way too close.

Damn, she was a good shot.

Slipping my scope away, I tapped my radio mounted in my eye, two short, fast taps to the temple, and it reached out to the frequency she was supposed to be using.

“This is Sergeant Gideon West to Harper Station, that’s friendly fire,” I said, then sighed as another round shrieked out and buried itself in the other side of the hill I was now laying on. “I say again, Harper Station, friendly fire. Stop shooting, you’re wasting rounds.”

I waited. Silence befell the area. No more shots.

Somewhere, a bird called, long and lonely.

Finally, my radio crackled.

“I need that confirmation code, Sergeant,” came a familiar voice.

I sighed. “Right. Confirmation Code: Delta Nine Delta Four Delta Six.”

“Confirmation Extension ID?” she asked.

“Tango Hotel Six One. Something happen?”

“Nothing more than usual, but you don’t survive to the ripe old age of thirty eight without being paranoid nowadays, Sergeant.”

“...you’re thirty nine.”

“How the fuck do you know that?” she asked, sounding somewhere between amused and annoyed.

“I had a look at your file. The nineteenth was two weeks ago,” I replied.

“...shut up and report to the front gate.”

“Is that my first official order, Commander?”

“Yes, Sergeant Smartass. Double time it. Out.” She cut the link and I chuckled despite myself.

Wiping some rainwater from my face, I got back up and began following a trail that would take me down the hill. The rain was light at least.

As I picked my way down the trail and then across the last portion of the bramble, moving between monolithic redwoods, I questioned myself on the intelligence of screwing with my new commanding officer before actually even getting to meet her in real life.

The rest of me answered the same way I always answered myself nowadays: did it really matter?

Maybe I was looking for trouble.

Maybe I was looking for a bit of pain.

I just grunted and kept on hauling that ruck through the rain. Nothing new there.

Habit made me grasp my rifle hanging from its sling as I approached the door. I double-tapped my radio again, automatically stepping to the side so as not to make a big appealing target when the door in the wall opened.

My old drill master’s voice was still in my head even now, a decade later: No area is friendly until you’ve made damn sure of that yourself.

It had saved my ass more than once.

“Present at the front gate, Commander Caspian.”

“Wait one.”

It was so ironic, I thought, that survival instincts and training still kept you alive, regardless of whether or not you actually wanted to survive.

The door began to slide open, and I saw that familiar one-white-eye face appear slowly. And then the door stopped, and something spat sparks.

Caspian lost her composure slightly and growled. “Sergeant West, one of the first things you can put on your list of things that need fixing,” she grunted, and then delivered a swift, hard kick to the door.

More sparks bled and then it finished its path.

I stepped in through and hit the close button with my elbow, listening more closely now as it closed.

After a moment, I grunted. “You got some servos that need replaced.”

“You have a good ear,” she murmured.

“Hard not to after...everything,” I replied.

“Quite. Come with me.”

Her other eye was blue. She was downright gorgeous up close, and it looked out of place on her in the way it always did when a very traditionally attractive woman ended up in a tough leadership role. Sometimes people just looked like they belonged doing something else.

Some people just looked like tech nerds.

Some people just looked like soldiers.

Some just looked like models, if we had those anymore.

I still didn’t believe the stories, although I’d seen a billboard once that was still surprisingly intact, and there had been a very attractive woman posing in not a whole lot on it so hey, maybe there did exist people for whom their entire career was to look good.

The only reason I looked like I belonged in my given career was because the word ‘combat’ had been placed in front of it. I got a lot of ‘you don’t look like a technician’, with the big scar down the right side of my face and the buzzed hair and the cold gray eyes, but then they went ‘oh, that makes sense’, right after I said ‘combat tech’.

Sometimes I said field tech, depending on the company.

“You have our gear?” Caspian asked as she led me towards a long, low, windowless structure.

“I do,” I replied. “All of it.”

“Thank fucking God,” she muttered. “We need it.” Stepping up to the structure, she pushed open the door. “This is the workstation, it’s where all of our gear and tech is stored, as well as are tools and spare parts and whatever else we can think of. You can stow it here for now.”

“Yep,” I replied, stepping inside.

The place was packed. Tables, desks, and shelves pretty much covered the perimeter of the room, all of them absolutely scattered with bits of metal, tools, nails and screws, bits of technology, circuit boards, and way more other junk, some of it truly esoteric.

I even saw an ancient, dirt-covered doll sitting up on one of the tables, staring one-eyed at the workstation.

The center of the building was also packed with tables and shelves, leaving a narrow path of space between the two areas.

“And that’s your new partner,” Caspian added, pointing to the lone figure standing about halfway down the structure.

I saw a slim blonde in a stained, faded blue jumpsuit with an absolutely massive amount of zippers across it standing in front of the tables. She wore a pair of big pink headphones that sported what for the life of me looked like cat ears.

She was staring at something with a small but powerful flashlight mounted on her headphones, a magnifying glass in hand.

I saw a spot of space where I could stow the gear for now not far from here. I began heading for the spot. My new partner looked busy so I figured I’d just drop it off and keep going with Caspian. She had something she wanted to say and I already knew what it was, but I couldn’t avoid it.

As I set it down, she began turning towards me and suddenly shrieked when she saw me. She leaped back, tripped, and fell on her ass. Her headphones fell off her head and she stared at me with shocked eyes.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said mildly. “Sorry.”

She looked past me, no doubt at Caspian, and seemed to relax.

“W-who are, who is this? What’s going on?” she asked.

“This is Sergeant West, Cat. The one you’ve been waiting for so...impatiently,” Caspian replied.

Her expression changed completely as she continued staring at me. She looked at me with something like...hope?

“You’re the combat tech?” she whispered.

I stepped closer to her and offered her a hand. “I am.”

“Oh my God,” she whispered, for a moment just staring at me still.

Tentatively, she reached up and took my hand. I pulled her to her feet. She kept looking at me, and then suddenly hugged me. I stood there for a moment, a few different emotions running feebly through my head, and, more out of habit than anything else, I hugged her back.

“Thank you.”

“Cat, you’re being weird again,” Caspian said.

“It’s fine,” I replied. “Hugs from beautiful women are always appreciated.”

Cat pulled back and looked up at me from where she’d been resting her head against my chest. For a second we just looked at each other, then she opened her mouth to say something, only nothing came out.

All at once, she backed away from me. She tried to speak again, failed to, cleared her throat.

“Uh...sorry. I’m not trying to be-uh, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Cat Hopper. And I’m-um, just, I’m-it’s good to meet you.”

“You too, Cat,” I replied, then shook her hand when she awkwardly offered it again.

“Come on, Sergeant.”

“Thanks again!” Cat called as we headed back outside.

“Yep,” I replied.

“You will have to forgive Cat,” Caspian said as she led me to the largest structure in the base, what I had seen her standing atop earlier. “She is currently our only technician, which means she is a field tech by default. And she is...nervous about leaving these walls.”

“I don’t blame her,” I replied. “I take it that means I will be assuming all field tech duties?”

“Yep,” she said.

“All right.”

She took me into a dingy dining area where a man with gray hair and sad eyes prepared something behind a counter. We locked eyes briefly.

There was grief and guilt in his gaze.

I wonder what he saw in mine.

“This way,” the Commander said.

She led me into a narrow stairwell that was almost hidden from sight, tucked up into the wall on the other side of the hall. It brought us up to a second-story office that looked not all that dissimilar from other CO offices I’d seen.

A big desk and a swivel chair. At least one big window with a view. Bulletproof glass, of course. A shelf covered in random things. Sometimes it was books, sometimes it was old printed out photographs, sometimes framed medals. And a big terminal in one corner.

The desk, near the center of the room, was more for the human side of the job.

“Sit,” she said as she walked around the desk.

I considered telling her I preferred to stand, but then I sat.

The more time I spent around Caspian, the more it felt like I knew her already. I was sure I didn’t literally know her, (she had a distinct voice with a slight twisted lilt of an accent that I’d be able to pick out in a heartbeat if I’d heard it before), but I knew her type.

She an air of calm, almost friendly authority. She was welcoming, but I knew there lay a cold, hard steel somewhere in her soul that she was not just willing to pull out and use if she had to, but very able.

Looking into this woman’s mismatched eyes, I knew she had sent men to their deaths.

Hundreds of them, maybe.

And not because she didn’t care, but because it was either lose a hundred men here and now, or lose a thousand people at some settlement somewhere.

So I took that seat. I’d been in those shoes before and just from her demeanor already, I could tell she was a tougher nut to crack than I was, and I respected that.

Tough was easy.

But tough, competent, and still human?

That was a saint.

“Let me be the first to officially welcome you to Harper Station. You’ll get the full tour after you and I have had a few words. First order of business, though: did you encounter anything of note out there, Sergeant?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I ran into a Phantom about five miles back. Killed it. I also saw an old refinery maybe six miles northeast of here and marked it on my map, since I didn’t see it marked on the old chart. Though it hadn’t been updated in a while.”

“We haven’t heard of a refinery so far. Good eye. About the Phantom...you were coming from the southeast, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Hmm. That’s the third Phantom we’ve seen in that directly...something to consider,” she muttered as she scribbled something down on her desk. She tossed aside the pen after a moment and looked at me with stern eyes. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else, Commander.”

“Fine. Let’s talk.”

For a moment, Caspian just stared at me, her hands clasped together in front of her on the desk. She was frowning, just a little. Unhappy, but thoughtful, and even compassionate.

I thought of telling her I already knew what she wanted to talk about, and what she was going to say, but didn’t.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t know what she was going to say.

I felt wrong more lately.

“Your previous CO told me about the...conditions under which you were transferring. To be completely honest with you, Gideon, I didn’t think we’d ever see you. Seventy miles through the bush, alone, delivering some cargo...it seemed like a suicide attempt.”

“It might have been,” I admitted.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know.”

“...I understand. But you did make it, and you are here, Gideon, and…” She hesitated, then she sighed heavily and looked out the door that led onto her deck.

Out at her outpost. Her base.

Her home.

Without looking at me, she said, “We don’t have many people here, and everyone here isn’t very stable. We all want to stay alive, much as a struggle as it might be, and lead for a last meal looking appetizing is just as much a threat as a Phantom sneaking up on you.”

Here, she looked back at me, right into my eyes.

“I won’t have you threatening us or what we have here, Gideon. Gloom is infectious, and we’ve all already got some. One look at you tells me you’re the type to keep your mouth shut through it all, no matter how bad it gets. And believe me, I know the appeal. It’s seductive in its stoicism. But we are not stoic, even now, even after everything that’s happened. Tragedy is in our blood. All of us. We’re here to help each other. If you’re having problems, talk to someone.”

She looked at me dead in the eyes for another long moment. I let the silence play out, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Understood,” I replied finally.

She let out a tiny sigh, clearly convinced she hadn’t gotten through to me. Abruptly, she stood up and then came around the desk again. “Come along, let’s get to that tour.”

Beneath the Ashes Preview | Chapter 1

Here it is, my post-apocalyptic subterranean harem! This is the first chapter.

The second chapter can be found here.

I will be posting the rest of this chapter-by-chapter on my Patreon for the 3$/month Patrons. This one will be going a bit slower as I’m taking more time on it.


The Passageway that connected Refuge to Wayport was said to be difficult to traverse, but not necessarily dangerous.

As the vast, dented front wall of Wayport finally came into sight at the far end of the Passageway he had been enduring for the past forty hours, Ethan breathed an immense sigh of relief and reflected bitterly that it was not just difficult and dangerous to move through, but also devastating.

He peered back the way he’d come and grit his teeth sourly as he spied what was very likely a trading caravan in the distance. Where had they been all this time? Where had anyone been all this time?

Up until now, Ethan thought that perhaps he had awoken to another apocalypse, this one inflicted on the subterranean world he and all other survivors of the first called home. He turned back to face the gate and began making his way towards it, careful to stick to the light, keep his weapon down and his movements slow.

Gate Guard could be a harrowing job and it wore on a person’s nerves. Back at home, he’d nearly shot some poor trader or traveler more than once because he was convinced one of the many lethal creatures that lurked in the shadows had come around for a visit.

How wretched would it be to survive everything that he had over the past two days, only to finally get to where he was going and end up with a bullet in his head from a nerve-worn, paranoid guard?

The great wall that sealed off the Passageway and separated Wayport from what some men and women referred to simply as the Vast or the Void, sometimes both, was riddled with bullet indents and had a few doors and windows built in.

Ethan got within about fifty feet of the wall before one of those windows opened up and a long gun barrel poked out.

“All right, that’s close enough! State your name and your business! You’re unscheduled!” a voice called out.

“My name is Ethan Lumos! I’m from Refuge! I seek sanctuary!” he called back.

A long pause. Though the barrel of the rifle remained unwavering, he imagined a frantic conversation happening on its other end.

“Is it true then?!” the voice called back. “Is Refuge gone!?”

“Yes!”

“And you’re the lone survivor?!”

“As far as I know!”

Another pause, this one even longer than before. Ethan felt more fear boiling around in his gut than any other moment over the past two days. There was absolutely nothing that said they had to let him in there. Theoretically, they could turn him away, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. And anything might prompt them to.

If the gate guards were in a bad mood, if they’d had some kind of disaster or emergency of their own, if they were feeling especially paranoid, or any other of a dozen reasons why a bastion might decide to impose a quarantine, he could be screwed.

And the next nearest bastion was a hell of a lot farther away than Wayport was from Refuge.

He’d survived the underground due mostly to luck and whatever skills he possessed and it had gotten him this far. Unless he had some massive stroke of luck, he wasn’t going to make it to the next safe haven and what began in Refuge would catch up with him.

“All right, come on! Nice and easy!” the voice called suddenly, and then the rifle disappeared and the window closed.

Ethan let out a heavy sigh of relief and began walking again, this time moving a little faster.

He wasn’t out of danger yet, although that was more or less true at all times. Danger came in degrees with life today, but he was at least out of the Vast. There were any number of ways he could get screwed over, injured, or straight up murdered within Wayport, but he was too tired to care. All the tension and anxiety had exhausted him.

He reached the huge steel wall and came to stand a careful distance from the much smaller door that had been cut into it. It opened up as he approached and a pair of grim-faced men with machine guns waited for him.

“Come on,” one of them said.

“Thank you,” Ethan replied as he hurried inside.

“Don’t thank us yet,” the other said as they sealed the door back up, “Captain wants to talk to you, and he’s been in one of his moods lately. Little piece of advice: best behavior for Captain Donovan. He tends to take things personally.”

“Noted,” Ethan muttered.

Great.

Now that he was beyond the entrance wall, Ethan took the opportunity to have his first look at Wayport. Being that Refuge was perhaps a quarter of the size, (less now that he was actually here looking at it), and being that Wayport was the nearest bastion for quite a ways, he had often heard of it.

Typically there would be a journey to Wayport about once every few months. The braver and more seasoned souls would form a caravan and take the most valuable things the handful of scavengers who lived among them had discovered in the tunnels or been holding onto, finally ready to give them up, often out of desperation.

They came back with, among other things, stories.

Given how entertainment was a bit sparse in the modern day and humans had largely reverted back to telling each other stories as a primary form of it, Ethan wasn’t sure what to expect now that he was actually here.

The place sure seemed busy enough, and big enough, but he could tell right away some of the rumors he’d heard were outright fabrications.

Or maybe they had been true years ago.

“You got hearing problems, kid,” the gate guard asked, forcibly returning Ethan’s attention to him.

“What?” he replied.

The man’s hand was out. “Gun.”

“Oh.”

He thought of trying to explain that he was basically dead on his feet after surviving out there in the tunnels, but the man didn’t look like he’d actually care to hear it. Gabe reluctantly passed his pistol over to the guard.

The man inspected it, then slipped it into his belt and seemed liked he was considering something. Probably trying to shake him down for more. Something decided him against the idea though.

“Come on,” he grunted, and he began leading Ethan on.

The ingress point let on a large, busy area within the vast cavern that Wayport was built into. The area was clearly a marketplace and it made sense that they would keep it so close to the entrance. In the decades that had passed since the great destruction overhead, humans had only become more insular, and outsiders were only reluctantly let into settlements.

Beyond the marketplace, he could get a sense for the size and rough layout of the bastion. Two general pathways drifted away, one to the left slanting down, the other to the right slanting up. Beyond that, he saw tiers in the earth, rings of structures built on higher ground running most of the periphery of the cavern.

The concept seemed simple: the higher the tier, the more influence the people had.

Or at least that was his impression, given the higher up houses and buildings looked of much nicer and sturdier make.

Ethan was being led towards what looked to be a reinforced pillbox structure to the immediate left of the gate. Atop it were a pair of old but very functional looking machine gun nests, just one of them being manned by a bored-looking bald guy.

He was brought to a heavy metal door set in the center of the bunker-like building. The guard banged on it twice and a slit snapped open.

“What, Murph?” someone groused from inside.

“New meat the Captain wanted to see,” the guard replied.

A grunt was the reply and the slit snapped shut. There was a heavy clank and then a squeal of metal as the door opened up. Like meat, Ethan was transferred from one guard to the next. This man was older, half his face scarred from what looked like a fire, and he seemed about as irritable as he was intimidating.

He said nothing as he led Ethan across a small entryway, through an open door at the back, down a dimly lit corridor all the way to its end, where he knocked on another, thinner metal door.

“Come!” came the reply.

The guard opened the door and stepped back. Ethan walked in and the door was shut firmly behind him. He found himself in a cramped office mostly taken up by a desk scattered with a random assortment of objects, a few chairs, and a shelf also packed with items. A healthy-looking rat was crawling around on the topmost shelf.

The man behind the desk looked somewhere in his fifties, grizzled and gruff like most everyone else. His head and face were buzzed, covered in a layer of graying stubble, and he had a scar down one cheek.

“Have a seat, son,” he said.

Ethan sat in front of the desk and for a long moment the man seemed to be taking a measure of him. Ethan waited and tried not to fall asleep in the chair.

“I’m Captain Donovan,” he said finally. He spoke with the ease of an authority not used to being questioned. “For all intents and purposes, I’m the one who says whether or not you get accepted into Wayport. My men tell me you came from Refuge. That true?”

“Yes, sir,” Ethan replied.

“What happened? We lost contact, but that’s nothing new. Had a merchant come through yesterday who said it was gone.”

“It is. Raiders attacked while we were sleeping. We fought them. That drew the attention of a big group of Strays. That escalated the fighting, which in turn started a fire. When it became obvious that the situation was screwed, we who were still alive ran through a back tunnel. We came back a few hours later, to see what could be salvaged, but all the chaos triggered a cave-in,” Ethan explained, seeing the horror replaying as he explained it listlessly.

“I see,” Donovan murmured quietly. He leaned back in his chair. “And the others?”

“They didn’t make it. Some died from their wounds. Most died in the attack and the fire. I did what I could to help with the others. We formed a group trying to make it here, but we kept running into problems on the way. Another Stray attack killed two. A Hornet killed another. And we ran into a Death Bot. I was the only one to make it out of that one.”

Donovan looked unhappier with each thing he said. “What’s your name?”

“Ethan Lumos.”

“Lumos...I think I remember your father. Peter?”

“Yes, sir.”

Maybe that’d buy him some points in his favor. Nepotism seemed to be just about everything. A connection to someone like Donovan, even a thin one, could be a significant boost. He waited in the quiet office while Donovan chewed over the information, at one point picking up a tablet and activating it. As he navigated it, the rat scurried down the shelf, across the floor, then up the desk and onto the man’s shoulder.

He reached up and pet it absently with his fingertips in between navigating the tablet.

“What can you do, Ethan Lumos?” he asked finally.

“What most other people can, I imagine,” he replied. “Cook. Clean. Move things. Harvest plants. Stand guard.”

“Nothing special?” Donovan asked after a pause.

Ethan shifted uncomfortably. “I’m good at staying alive out in the tunnels,” he admitted reluctantly.

“I can see that, if you made it here on your own with the way things are nowadays.” Donovan paused and lifted himself up a little, studying Ethan. “You made it here without a gun?”

“No, I had one. Your man at the gate took it.”

“Did he now? What was it?”

“Silversmith.”

“Six or eight?”

“Six-shot.”

“You must be strong, those have a hell of a kick.”

Ethan shrugged. “I did a lot of hard labor digging out a new tunnel.”

“Well, we could always use another tunnel crawler. There’s a lot to be done and a lot more to be found out there,” Donovan said.

“I appreciate that fact, but in truth, I’d much rather find work within the bastion if it could be helped. I’ve...really had my fill of it out there,” he replied uncomfortably.

Donovan let out a bitter chuckle. “I can’t fault you for that. Did twenty years as a crawler myself. It’s brutal out there.” He lost his half-smile and checked over his tablet again, his grizzled face bathed in its pale blue glow. With a sigh, he shook his head. “You’ve come to Wayport at a bad time, I’m afraid. Times are tough and we’re in a rough patch right now. I appreciate your situation and your father once saved my life.

“I can’t do much to help you, and what I can do is going to cost you. There’s a shack I can set you up with. It doesn’t have power or water right now, but you’ll have to talk to Smith and Wexler about that. As for jobs, unfortunately, if you aren’t willing to crawl, there’s not much that can be done. We’ve got a strict three-month waiting policy for new residents. You go three months without causing problems and then you can start being considered for work in the power core or hydroponics or patrol,” he explained.

He finished up what he was doing on the big tablet and then switched over to a smaller one, typed rapidly on it, then passed it to Ethan.

“Fill this out. Accurately.”

Ethan just nodded and did as he was told, feeling relief tentatively beginning to take hold within him. He was being let in. He was being made a resident and given a place to live. He answered the questions as they appeared on his screen.

His name. Birth date. Physical dimensions. Skills. Knowledge.

He passed it back when he was done and Donovan looked it over, grunted once, and typed something into it.

“All right, now comes time for resettlement fees...I’m afraid I’m going to have to clean you out in exchange for entry into the bastion and a place to live. As I said, times are tough.” He tapped a relatively clean spot on his desk. “Everything you got but your clothes.”

Ethan repressed a sigh as he got to his feet and began emptying the pockets of his survival suit. He’d found it, and a few other things, out there in the tunnels. He set down a handful of bullets, a combat knife, a blue crystal, a canteen mostly empty of water, a few nutrient bars, and a handful of coins.

“Thought your people didn’t use currency?” Donovan muttered, picking up a silver coin and studying.

“We don’t. Found those in the Passageway,” Ethan replied.

“You understand how it works?”

“The bigger they are, the more they’re worth is what I heard.”

Donovan laughed softly. “Yeah, more or less...this is it?” he asked.

“This is it,” Ethan replied, patting his pockets. “Everything I had on me.”

Donovan looked at him for a moment, then passed him back the silver coin. Ethan took it tentatively. “Wex is going to give you some shit when you ask him to turn on the water. He’s supposed to give new residents alpha level rations, which isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing. If he does, hold out for a bit, then bribe him with that.”

“Thank you,” Ethan replied, unsure of what else to say.

The rat hopped off the man’s shoulder and landed on his desk as it sensed him preparing to move more significantly. It scurried around a bit as Donovan stood and walked over to a battered old locker. Opening it up, he rummaged around inside until he came up with a metallic card. He sat back down and passed it to Ethan.

It had a faded 26 on it.

“That’s how you get into your shack. Don’t lose it. It also serves to prove you’re a resident of Wayport. There’s a board in Market Square where jobs get posted. You’re flagged as an alpha level resident, and that means shit jobs unless you want to crawl,” he said, adding a bit of emphasis to that again.

Ethan simply nodded, not wanting to respond.

He really didn’t want to crawl in the tunnels again.

“Your shack is left of the Market. Down. In the pit.” Donovan regarded him as Ethan stood up and pocketed the coin and his card. “Don’t expect any help beyond this...good luck.”

Ethan just nodded, thanked him again, and left the office.