Trappers and Trolls: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Novel, page 1
TRAPPERS AND TROLLS
Trailer Park Vampire #6
by
H.P. MALLORY
&
J.R. RAIN
The Trailer Park Vampire Series
Shotguns and Shifters
Hillbillies and Hellhounds
Gut Rot and Gargoyles
Bumpkins and Banshees
Rednecks and Redcaps
Trappers and Trolls
Other Books by H.P. Mallory
PARANORMAL WOMEN’S FICTION:
Midlife Mysteries
Midlife Spirits
Haven Hollow
Misty Hollow
Trailer Park Vampire
Gwen’s Ghosts
PARANORMAL ROMANCE:
Witch, Warlock & Vampire
Lily Harper
Dulcie O’Neil
Gates of the Underworld
PARANORMAL REVERSE HAREM:
Happily Never After
My Five Kings
Other Books by J.R. Rain
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE
Moon Dance
Vampire Moon
American Vampire
Moon Child
Christmas Moon (novella)
Vampire Dawn
Vampire Games
Moon Island
Moon River
Vampire Sun
Moon Dragon
Moon Shadow
Vampire Fire
Midnight Moon
Moon Angel
Vampire Sire
Moon Master
Dead Moon
Lost Moon
Vampire Destiny
Infinite Moon
Vampire Empress
Moon Elder
Wicked Moon
Winter Moon
Sasquatch Moon
Moon Blade
Wild Moon
Moon Magic
Moon World
Vampire Deep
Moon Matador
Sun Dance (coming soon)
SAMANTHA MOON ADVENTURES
Banshee Moon
Moon Monster
Moon Ripper
Witch Moon
Moon Goddess
Moon Blaze
Golem Moon
Moon Maidens
SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES
Moon Bayou
Blood Moon
Parallel Moon
SAMANTHA MOON ORIGINS
New Moon Rising
Moon Mourning
Haunted Moon
Trappers and Trolls
Published by Rain Press
Copyright © 2023 by J.R. Rain & H.P. Mallory
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Reading Sample: Wrath of the Gods
About J.R. Rain
About H.P. Mallory
Trappers and Trolls
Chapter One
It had only been about fifteen minutes, but the party was already in full swing.
And why not? It’d been a while—I didn’t want to think how long a while—since anybody in Windy Ridge had something worth celebrating. Even the fact that it was a cloudy afternoon outside couldn’t do much to put a damper on things. Of course, if your average outsider had come into this diner and seen the customers, they’d have run out twice as fast as they’d run in.
Not that anyone human was likely to rain on our parade, or our party, as the case may be. This little stretch of the Ozarks was so far out of the way, it might as well not even exist as far as most folks were concerned. Still, there was something to be said for every customer in my diner (God, did I still have trouble believing it was mine now). Each one of them looked like some sort of monster out of the movies. That trickled all the way down to their eating habits, which could make feeding anybody here a tricky business. But I didn’t mind—this diner was mine now and so was the responsibility of feeding these neighbors of mine.
“Need a hand with that, Ms. Twila?” Hannah asked, her fox ears raised up to give the question a little emphasis.
“Nah, honey, I’m good,” I promised her, lifting the huge tray of food like it was made out of air. That extra strength of mine was owing to the vampire blood coursing through my veins. “How’s the pie looking?”
Hannah’s long fox tail twitched twice before she looked down into the oven. She squinted hard before saying, “Figure it’s got about five minutes. Want me to keep an eye on it?”
“Uh, uh, I’ll do that. You just take care of the rest of the counter customers, alright?”
“Yes’m,” she said with a quick nod before going over to one of our customers with a tray of her own. Since the man she was serving was a literal deer-man, his plate actually looked like something humans could eat, all raw vegetables and fruits.
Going over to the corner of the room, everyone was doing the same stuff that happens at any party where there ain’t no alcohol: talking loud, eating a lot, and laughing at stuff that probably wasn’t that funny. Me, I couldn’t help but smile. Most of the boys piled up in this part of the diner were our town’s unofficial Monster Squad. There were pretty much the only thing that kept something close to law and order after the red fog had blown in.
These days, we all shared that duty with another guest at the table... one that made my heart do flip-flops to see—my old high-school flame, and my new... well, I wasn’t sure what. All I did know was that Dean was making my fangs grow out. When a girl says she could ‘just eat someone up’, I doubt she meant the words like I did. And my vampire teeth were aching something terrible to sink themselves right into Dean’s juicy neck.
“Who wants some more?” I called out, putting the fresh tray in front of them as I reminded myself I needed to get into the back and drink a bag of blood. My cravings for Dean were something that worried me something awful, truth be told.
That got a shout out of everybody, along with some scattered applause. “You sure put up a good spread, Ms. Twila,” Bud said, his seat thumping as his tail started wagging with excitement. It was matched by the drool coming off his wolf muzzle, leaving big drops all over his plate.
“Dammit, keep that feckin’ tail under control!” Slim Jim spat, giving the wolfman a hard shove to drive home the point.
“Now that wasn’t nice,” Dean said with a quiet laugh. Then he raised his brows at the irate muskrat man who was doing the shoving.
That made Slim Jim straighten up and swallow hard. “Yeah... sorry, Sheriff.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Dean said, pointing at Bud. “He’s the one you shoved.”
Bud laughed, clearly without a care, before grabbing the nearest hunk of meat. “Ah, ain’t no never mind,” he said between bites. “Been putting up with this rascal’s bellyachin’ for years now.”
As much as his lizard mouth would let him, Ol’ Ned frowned at Bud’s pillaging the food. “You forgettin’ the youngun might want some o’ that too?” he challenged the wolfman.
The ‘youngun’ he was talking about had her pert nose twitching in delight. Given that everything from the red ballcap down was built like a tank, it was the only ‘pert’ thing on her. “Is that what I think it is?”
My pride and joy, my daughter, was sitting next to her and grinning hard while doing her own sniffing. “Definitely bear meat, Trixie-Belle,” Sicily said. “Told you Mama would take care of you.”
“Here you go, darlin’,” Slim Jim said, sliding a plate of the meat over. “Figure you’ll eat that nice and civilized-like.”
“And just what’s wrong with how I’m eating this?” Bud asked with mock indignity.
That got a grin out of the younger man, who was sitting beside Dean, wearing his sheriff’s department uniform. “Well, you do kind of remind me of how Sonny chomps on his food...”
That got another round of laughter and shouting that hurt my ears a bit. But I didn’t mind. Poor Trixie had lost her mind, like so many others, after the fog hit. To go from a teen girl to a redcap couldn’t have been easy. It was about time she got to enjoy being around other people again.
“So, when do you start back to school, Trixie?” I asked the girl, while picking up the old tray.
“Oh, next Monday, Ms. Twila,” Trixie told me, thoughtful enough to chew and swallow before answering. “Never thought I’d be so glad to go back but...”
My sweet little girl put a sisterly hand on Trixie’s broad shoulder. “You won’t be alone like last time. You need any help on classwork when you try to get caught up, just tell me.”
Trixie grinned down at Sicily with a mix of gratitude and embarrassment. “Yeah, well, might be taking you up on that one pretty soon.”
“Th-th-that’s not all the good news either ,” the pale fellow with no hair said from his seat. While Boone had what some folk would call ‘monster looks’, he was the only one to come out of the fog still human. In fact, given how it had cured him of his terminal cancer, he was likely the luckiest fellow in all of Damnation County.
Trixie gave him another embarrassed look while rubbing the back of her neck. “Ah, it’s not that big a deal...”
“The feck it is!” Slim Jim snapped. “Ain’t every day some tough girl like you makes the football team!”
“Really?” I asked with new appreciation.
“My idea,” Dean said, lifting up his hand. “I had lots of anger back when I was playing towards... well, everything.” He nodded at our redcap guest of honor. “Figured it might do Trixie some of the same good.”
That got a general round of agreement from everybody else. Sicily tossed in a quick sideways hug that made Trixie smile.
“Surprised that fool principal went along with it,” Ol’ Ned said, slurping up his disgusting meal of crawling insects. When Dean gave him a look, the lizardman held up his hands. “No disrespect, Sheriff, but that weasel don’t just cotton to any old idea.” He grunted and added, “Especially if it involves womenfolk being somewhere dummies like him don’t think they belong.”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” Sicily snapped.
“Exactly what I told Principal Houk,” Dean agreed with a nod towards Sicily. “Trixie didn’t hurt anybody, didn’t steal anything, didn’t hold anybody against their will. That puts her a few legs up on some folk we’ve had to deal with.”
Mason gave his uncle a grin that all but advertised how full of it the older man was. “Think the winning argument was that with Trixie on the team, Thurgood High would actually have a chance against Damnation Central for the first time ever.”
That got him an affectionate elbow in the ribs from his uncle. “Oh, would you quit ruining the story?”
“Even if it’s not the truth?” Mason asked with a laugh.
“Especially if ain’t the feckin’ truth!” Slim Jim roared, getting a laugh from the whole table.
I was getting in on the spirit of it along with them, so much that I freaked when I looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh, hell,” I muttered. “That pie’s gonna burn if I stay out here one more minute.”
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to share, Sicily?” Mason asked before I could get more than two steps from the table.
That made my Momma Bear (or maybe Momma Vampire) instincts go on high alert. I knew Dean’s nephew had a thing for my daughter and the feeling was mutual. So, any ideas they cooked up between them always got my suspicions up. When Sicily wouldn’t meet my eyes, those suspicions only got worse.
Trixie gave her a shoulder squeeze before saying, “Won’t take that long to tell her.”
My little girl—whom I was still having trouble thinking of as being a young woman—nodded before lifting her eyes. “I’m thinking about joining the cheer squad next semester.”
“What?” I asked in bewilderment. That was absolutely not what I’d been expecting to hear.
“Well, since one of my friends is on the football team...” Sicily said before trailing off. Then she took a deep breath and finished with, “I want to do what I can to support her.”
It was then I smelled something that might have had a lot in common with burning pie. “I’d better get that pie pronto,” I said before leaving a gust of wind behind me as I rushed off. Pretty sure I blew away a lot of loose items off the other customers’ plates in the process. When I yanked out the pie, I saw I’d just saved it in time.
I inhaled the scents coming off it before sighing. I really did miss eating solid food. Sure, I could still take a bite of it if I wanted, but I’d be puking it back up after a while. When I turned around to place the pie on the counter, I nearly jumped when I saw Dean leaning against it on the other side.
“Get there in time?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow at the pie.
“Just,” I told him, putting the pie on the counter. Hannah was dealing with customers on the other end. “Having super-speed comes in handy for moments like this.”
Dean took a deep inhale of his own and a small smile played across those usually stoic lips. “No arguing that,” he said. “Speaking of, you want to tell me why you really dashed off from the table so fast?” I opened my mouth to give him an indignant answer which he cut off with, “And before you say it, I’m pretty sure you’d have been just as fast if that pie still had a minute or two left to go.”
That was both the thing I loved and loathed about Dean. My old boyfriend—and current sort-of boyfriend—had a BS detector that was second to none in this county. Given that he’d been an estranged son, a city cop and now sheriff of this locality, I reckon he needed one.
“Who says there’s anything else?”
“I do. And I wouldn’t say it unless I was sure.”
I put the knife down and rubbed my face. “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I’m just... I’m not comfortable with Mason dating my daughter.”
“Sicily isn’t a child any longer, you know that.”
I nodded. “Of course, I know that. But... well... how would you feel about any man looking at Skye?”
That got a wince out of Dean—a wince most people would have missed. But since I saw it, I held up my hand and shook my head. “Okay, that wasn’t very sensitive of me, given how you two aren’t talkin’. I apologize.”
“And you’re forgiven,” he answered on a smile. “What’s the problem with Mason?”
“There’s no problem with Mason—he’s a great... boy.”
“He’s hardly a boy.”
Dear sweet Jesus, I was getting my words all a-jumble. “I mean, well, Mason is older than she is.”
Dean shrugged. “So was Alton. You still had Sicily by him.”
“That’s different!” I protested, feeling my fangs sticking out again. God, did I need a drink of blood right then.
“Different how?” Dean pushed, uncrossing his arms to spread them out.
With all the agitation that was going on inside me, I knew I’d have to pick my next words carefully. It was a struggle but I got there. “Mason’s a young man, yes. But he’s also a grown man. Sicily’s... well, she’s still in high school.”
Dean hummed thoughtfully. “Granted, but what’s your point?”
“My point is both of them are in totally different stages of life right now. If they both were in one or the other, maybe it’d be okay. But...” Having run out of words, I went back to slicing the pie.
“Little problem with that argument,” Dean said. “Far as I can tell, they’re going to be in ‘different stages of life’ for the rest of theirs. Are you going to be fine with Sicily dating him when she’s twenty-five and he’s thirty?”
Damn him for making too much sense. Thankfully, the last of the pie was sliced up. “Better get this on out while it’s still hot,” I said, picking it up and fully intending to sidestep the rest of this conversation.
Before I could get a step off, the ground suddenly shook a little. It wasn’t enough to make me or Dean lose our footing, but it rattled the pans and silverware all the same. It went away as quick as it came though. Both of us looked at each other. “Earthquake?” I finally asked. “In Missouri?”
“Anywhere else, I’d say impossible,” Dean answered. “But seeing as this is Damnation County...”
“Yeah,” I said, finally getting a move on with the pie.
Dean got in front of me. “You never did answer my question.”
I didn’t then either. With another little burst of super-speed, I sidestepped him and got the pie over to the party. But, all the while, all I could think about was that little shake we’d just gone through.
Chapter Two
I was about halfway home when an unwelcome visitor decided to step in front of me on the path.
“And just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Twila Boseman?”
It took everything I had not to groan. Aside from that moment with Dean and the tremor, the rest of the evening had gone okay. Dean even ducked out from the party a little early to go check on how the new prison was coming along, taking Mason and Ol’ Ned with him. That made things a lot less awkward for me, though I was a little worried about Sicily being bummed. But she was having so much fun with Trixie that she barely noticed. Two hours later, I’d locked up the diner for the night and started the walk home. That would have been the moment that Karen Dooley decided to ruin my otherwise decent day.
