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  Forever and a Knight

  by Bridget Essex

  Synopsis:

  A warrior woman, a DJ from Boston, and a love story that's out of this world...

  Josie Beckett is a shock jock DJ--she's sarcastic, funny and doesn’t believe in anything at all, certainly not in magic. But she’s going to start believing when she finds herself no longer in her apartment’s basement…but in the wild woods of another world entirely. And falling (literally) onto a woman who makes her heart skip a beat.

  Attis, the mysterious, dashing woman Josie unceremoniously fell onto, was once a knight…but tragedy caused her to give up her dream. Josie is now on another world, a world where cheap coffee, twenty-four hour hot dog stands and radio don't exist--and she has no idea how to get home. When Attis offers to let Josie accompany her to the capital city of this strange, magical country, Josie embarks on the ride of her life. There's so much more to Attis than meets the eye, and in the span of a couple of days, Josie finds herself falling for the brooding, quiet warrior woman who was there to catch her.

  Can the two women find a way back to Josie’s world…or will love make Josie want to stay? And, of course, there’s the tiny problem that, in the dark woods of this strange, new world, there is something following Josie and Attis...

  "Forever and a Knight"

  © Bridget Essex 2015

  Rose and Star Press

  First Edition

  All rights reserved

  No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Rose and Star Press except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews. Please note that piracy of copyrighted materials is illegal and directly harms the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication:

  For Natalie, the love of my life, my beautiful knight in shining armor who wields a pen (which is, as the old saying goes, much mightier than a sword). A present et toujours. Now and always.

  And this book is especially dedicated to our beloved cat, Kit. Every day, I miss you. Always, I will love you.

  Contents:

  Chapter 1: The Shutdown

  Chapter 2: The Laundry

  Chapter 3: The Bear

  Chapter 4: The Cat

  Chapter 5: The Ex-Knight

  Chapter 6: The Ghost

  Chapter 7: The Leap

  Chapter 8: The Feather

  Chapter 9: The Locket

  Chapter 10: The Decision

  Chapter 11: The City

  Chapter 12: The Star

  Chapter 13: The Parting

  Chapter 14: The Beginning

  More from Bridget Essex

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1: The Shutdown

  “Good morning, Boston! This is Josie Beckett with LEM 100.5, Public Access Radio, here to tell you that it’s going to be a really good morning,” I purr into the microphone, pushing down the level for the start music as I chuckle. No one can see me in the sound booth, but that doesn’t stop me from rolling my eyes.

  Yeah, it’s not really going to be a good morning. But then, I’m pretty sure my listeners can hear the dripping sarcasm in my voice.

  “I’ve got some great stuff for you on this gloomy Monday, folks,” I say with a smirk. “Today,” I growl, dropping my voice and almost whispering in suspense, “I have supposed eyewitness accounts”—skepticism that I can’t quite hide makes the next few words sharp—“who swear they saw the ‘Boston Beast.’”

  I punch one of my buttons that gives me a sustained “sad trombone” sound effect, pressing the laugh track button right after that as I chuckle myself. “Of course,” I sigh, “I don’t need to remind you—but I will, anyway!—what the Boston Beast supposedly was, or how it supposedly terrorized the docks down at the harbor. Yeah, folks, you remember how people were saying they saw a, and I quote, ‘creature’ out in the water about a month ago. It ‘looked like the Loch Ness Monster but with more teeth,’ said a guy in one of the most popular news clips that the news stations have been playing. You will also remember that our sister station, LEM, Public Access Television, was the first station to pick up this ridiculous story, thus kind of destroying our credibility, but there you go.” I shrug, cue up my fade-to-commercial music. “Don’t go away!” I tell my listeners. “I’ll be right back with eyewitness accounts that’ll make you roll your eyes, but at least,” I purr, “it’ll start your day off right, like I always do here on Josie in the Morning.”

  I set the commercials to play and stand up, stretching overhead and massaging the back of my neck. My mind is racing a mile a minute. I have the supposed eyewitness accounts blinking on my phone panel. My assistant already set up the interviews and has them waiting on standby, but the eyewitnesses are also probably listening to the radio station, waiting to be put on the air. So they’ve likely heard how I’m framing these interviewees: as the nutballs they are. As a shock jock, I’m used to diffusing anger and using it to make the on-air interview even better, but I also don’t want to lose those interviews and deal with dead air.

  “Hey, Stella?” I yell out into the corridor. My assistant, Stella—a poor college kid who got roped into doing this as an internship (i.e., she’s not even being paid to put up with me)—trots down the aisle in her ridiculously high heels (I’m thinking today’s pair are six inches, which—to me—translates as stilts, but then what do I know? I’m a sneaker lady). Stella has her clipboard clutched tightly against her and is looking a bit perplexed. “Sorry to bug you, but can you make sure,” I tell her, stretching overhead again, “that the interview folks are still on the line?”

  “I just did,” she says, one brow raised as she looks at me a little funny, her head to the side. “Great lead-in, by the way,” she mutters with a frown. She bites her lip, and she looks like she’s going to say something before she shakes her head. “You know Deb wants to speak with you still...”

  I grimace and massage the back of my neck a little deeper, trying not to sigh. Deb Oliver, my station manager, put a memo in my inbox that it was urgent I speak with her this morning, but there was so much to do for today’s show (and so much to tackle from over the weekend) that I hadn’t had the chance to answer her yet.

  “Tell her I’ll see her soon,” I say to Stella, who widens her eyes.

  “You can’t blow off the station manager, Josie,” she tells me briskly. “My business relationships professor says—”

  I raise my eyebrows and lean on the door frame with a sigh. Stella’s a great kid, and I’m lucky to have her as my intern, but nobody’s perfect. “Did he talk to you about prioritizing?” I ask, raising a brow. “Because I have a show to run, and I’m sure Deb, of all people, wants to make certain I run it.”

  Stella bites her lip and rocks forward a little as she sighs, too. “Point taken. Just...talk to her as soon as you can, okay?” She glances at me worriedly. “She really didn’t look happy this morning.”

  For some reason, a foreboding feeling twists my gut for half a second. But then I shove it down and straighten. I have a show to do.

  “Knock ‘em dead,” Stella tells me sincerely, and shuts the door behind me as I return to my seat, the last commercial fading out.

  “Always do,” I mutter, silencing the butterflies in my stomach as I pull my headphones back on and turn up the start music again.

  “You’re listening to Josie in the Morning on Boston’s LEM Public Access Radio,” I say into the microphone with an exaggerated smile. Listeners can def
initely hear if I’m smiling or not. “Up next for your listening pleasure,” I purr smoothly, glancing at the still-blinking phone panel, “we have some local folks who swear they saw the Boston Beast...in the supposed flesh. If,” I snort, “it even had flesh, since the Boston ghost hunting group PARECs tells us that it might have actually been the ghost of an old sea monster... Yeah, you heard me right. Honestly, I can’t make this up, guys. Our first caller, Garth Bradbury, thinks the Boston Beast was, at the very least, a living monster. Garth owns a commercial fishing vessel that was out in the bay the first morning that eyewitness accounts saw the Beast. Welcome to Josie in the Morning, Garth. You’re on the air.” I cross my fingers and flick the lit-up caller button.

  “Hi, Josie,” drawls a strong southern accent into my ears. “Glad to be here.”

  “Garth, can we hear in your words exactly what you saw that morning?” I ask him, picking up my coffee cup, relaxing just a little.

  “Sure can!” he says, too excitedly. “Well, ya know, we had the boat out like we always do, and we were looking back toward Boston when we saw a dark hump in the water. I thought it might be a whale, ’cause we have a lot of whales in these parts, ya know, but then the Beast stuck its head out of the water, and I can tell you—it weren’t no whale. Was the scariest thing I ever saw in my life, after my wife when she gets up in the morning.” He laughs at his own ridiculous joke, and I congratulate myself for not sighing audibly into the microphone.

  “Can you describe the supposed Beast?” I ask, letting a little sarcasm leak into my voice.

  “It looked sort of like one of them plesiosaurus things,” the guy says promptly. He probably pulled that line from one of the newspaper articles or news spots about the Beast. For some reason, I doubt most people could conjure a comparison to ‘plesiosaurus’ out of their asses. “The Beast had a big, long neck, and a hell of a lot of teeth,” he continues, still talking a little too quickly, like he’s nervous to be on-air. “But it didn’t pay no mind to my boat,” he says then. “It just kept going in the direction it was headed—toward Boston.”

  “And you’re sure you weren’t, uh, under the influence of anything stronger than salt water that morning?” I chuckle a little into the microphone. “Was anyone else with you? Can anyone else corroborate your story? Garth, did anyone else see what you saw?”

  “A lot of folk saw what I saw, missy,” mutters the guy, going from nervous to irate in about half a second flat. “Ask anyone! Hell, everyone near the harbor or shore saw what I saw that day, and—”

  “Actually, there are only about ten people coming forward willingly with a similar story right now, Garth,” I tell him briskly, flicking on the next caller button and ending Garth’s call. “Like Susan Redding from Gloucester, who—like you—was out in her boat that morning, harvesting her lobster pots. Welcome to the show, Susan,” I tell her.

  “Hi, Josie—I love your show, listen to it every morning,” she gushes. She sounds like a nice lady; I’d hate to rip her apart on air. But all these people swear up and down that they saw something that is utterly and obviously not possible.

  I take a deep breath.

  “Glad to have you, Susan,” I tell her, glancing up at the window connecting my recording booth to the hallway.

  Stella is out there, grimacing and flicking her red-nailed index finger over her neck again and again.

  It’s a cue to cut to commercial break.

  And, usually this cue is only used when something is desperately wrong.

  My stomach turns again, but I’m all business. “And we’ll hear more from Susan,” I say quickly, cutting Susan’s first syllable off before she can say any more, “after the break.” I flick on the commercials, frowning as I take off my headphones and stand up.

  Stella’s already in the booth, shutting the soundproof door behind her and leaning against it with a deep frown. “Josie, we’ve got trouble,” she tells me, her brown eyes wide.

  I sigh and roll back on my heels, running a hand through my hair. “The other callers dropped off because I think they’re all crazy?”

  “No,” she tells me, licking her lips. Her eyes are wide, she's as pale as bad milk, and she actually looks like she might throw up at any moment.

  That’s when I realize that it’s much, much worse than a few irate callers.

  “I don’t really know how to say this,” she tells me, her voice weak and shaky. She glances at the big clock on the other side of the room. “Um...”

  With absolutely no warning at all, the lights overhead go out. We're plunged into darkness.

  “Um,” repeats Stella miserably in the dark. “We lost the Moran grant.”

  The lights on my equipment go out, followed almost instantly by the lights in the hallway. Far, far down at the end of the hall is a window to the outside world which sheds a moderate amount of light down the hall and a little into my studio—just enough to see how upset Stella appears, and how bulky and unhelpful my equipment looks when it’s not—you know—actually running.

  I stare at her, my mind running on overdrive. I have no idea how to even process this. It’s as if Stella told me a mythical unicorn walked into the radio station and wanted to volunteer as a paper puncher.

  “Where the hell is Deb?” I mutter, tossing my silent headphones into my chair and prowling past Stella, half seething and half completely numb.

  It can’t possibly be true, is the thing. Stella is the best assistant I’ve ever not paid (and better than the ones I have paid), but she must have gotten her wires crossed in communication or something. It can’t be true.

  Once upon a time, Old Uncle Sam gave public access radio and television a break in the form of cash. But that was a long time ago. These days, the only way that public radio and TV stays on the air is because (really) “viewers like you” donate money to the cause. Grants, especially, are one of the best ways to keep us afloat.

  The Moran grant was our biggest grant. And if we did actually lose the grant, this means that LEM Public Access Radio is toast. And LEM Public Access Television will be able to run for only about an hour a day, but would—essentially—be toast, too.

  It would mean that LEM Public Access Radio was off the air.

  It’s not really possible that we lost the grant. Maybe Stella misheard or there was a massive miscommunication. Maybe some really unfortunate squirrel got zapped by the power lines outside, and that’s why our power was cut and the generators aren’t working. Yeah. Totally. I mean, there was talk that the grant might not exactly be secure, that the grant's trust committee had been considering pulling funding from LEM Public Access and giving the money to some other organization (and I quote) “more respectable than public radio.”

  But it was all just talk.

  They hadn’t meant it.

  They couldn’t mean it. Because if they did...well, Boston would be losing one hell of a fine radio station, for one. It would mean that I, and everyone else here, would be losing our jobs.

  And it would mean that Boston's public radio and television would, technically, go the way of the dinosaur.

  I stalk down the labyrinthine hallways until I get to Deb’s office. But I don’t actually reach my station manager’s office... I sort of just join the line of unhappy people outside said office, standing around, leaning against the walls and uneasily muttering under their breath as they wait to be heard.

  “This is shit,” says Carly Aisley, as she huffs out her breath and pages through her smartphone. She turns to look back at me and raises an eyebrow.

  Carly is a producer for the television side of things—we’re about equal as far as rank goes, and we really have nothing to do with each other, but it’s kind of a small station.

  And it’s pretty much public knowledge that we can’t stand the sight of each other.

  This hasn’t always been the case. It is true that from the get-go we’ve been at odds. You know how sometimes you meet someone and you don’t like them from the very first moment, but you wo
uld never be able to explain exactly why? That was Carly and me. And the feeling was utterly mutual. I mean, it’s no secret that I’m an eternal skeptic and Sarcasm is my primary language. Carly's the exact opposite: she believes anything and everything and runs one of Boston’s biggest ghost hunting groups.

  You can see that we’d have a lot to clash over.

  But that was all okay. All of it. We were friendly to one another and agreed to disagree.

  Until Carly brought the Boston Beast to air on the television network. And our acquaintanceship went downhill from there.

  “I heard you were going to interview the Beast’s eyewitnesses this morning,” Carly growls at me, glancing me up and down. Her eyes narrow as she tosses curly hair over her shoulder “Did we have fun ripping apart innocent bystanders who saw something they can’t explain and are getting tremendous flack for being brave enough to talk about it publicly?”

  I cross my arms and frown, raising a single eyebrow. I don’t need this right now. “I interviewed people who are trying to get their five minutes of fame,” I mutter back, rolling my eyes. “This Boston Beast stuff is all tabloid crap, and you know it—”

  “You saw my footage, and you know that it wasn’t fabricated,” she starts in on me, immediately heated.

  But just at that moment, Deb Oliver—our station manager, and the most frazzled woman I’ve ever met in my life—pushes her office door open and prowls out of her office to stand in the center of the hallway. Her tight gray curls are waving around her face, and the plaid suit she’s wearing—a classic from the eighties that she still swears up and down is fashionable since “these damn fashions cycle around even ten years or so”—is all shoulder pads. But even her shoulder pads are drooping with dejection today. Not a good sign.

  Deb glances up and down at the line of people gathered and waiting for her outside her office. She sighs for a long moment before upending a small palmful of white pills she was holding into her mouth and washing them down with a couple of generous gulps of coffee. She brandishes her large coffee mug toward us.