Free Uninvited: A Paranormal Urban Fantasy Novel (The Dark Skies Trilogy Book Two) by Lysa Daley

when the truck slows.
    “Look,” Ruby points out in front of us.
    A quarter of a mile down the road there’s a dead-end. The road just stops, and the never-ending forest of pine trees engulfs everything around us.
    “We’ve come to the end of the line,” Ruby slows the truck. “Maybe we turned down the wrong road?”
    “There isn’t another road. Not for another fifty miles and that one cuts north to Idaho.” I say as tears fill my eyes.
    The trouble is I’m confident that we’re in the exact spot of the coordinates. Maybe I was wrong the whole time. Maybe the sequence of numbers wasn’t longitude and latitude, and now I’ve dragged us into the middle of nowhere.
    I gambled on the fact that there might be a hospital someplace out here, and I lost.
    “Wait,” Ruby says, her eyes as big as saucers as she squints out the front windshield. “Something’s moving through the trees up there.”
    She's right. Something is coming our way. Something big.
    After a long, tense moment, a big brown head appears.
    “Is that… ” Ruby gasps. “A grizzly bear?”
    Grizzly bear, brown bear, polar bear; not exactly sure except for the fact that a really, really big bear is lumbering toward us.
    “What do we do?” Ruby asks.
    “Stay calm.”
    The bear stops at the foot of our truck. Standing up on hind legs, his impressive jaws part and he lets out a ferocious roar.
    Ruby throws the truck into reverse and starts to backup. After five yards, she slams on the breaks. “Oh my god, Astrid! Look behind us.”
    I swivel to see two more brown bears coming at us from the woods. Great, now we're surrounded.
    Tom leaps from the back seat into my lap. He puts his paws up on the window and cautiously observes the first bear. Tom cries to gets out and paws at the window.
    “No way, buddy!” I say, protectively holding him. “You’re not going out there.”
    “What does he want?” Ruby asks
    “I think he wants to get out,” I reply.
    “Those bears will eat him alive.”
    But I think back to the fire at my old house and the massive beast who defeated the three Johnsons. That creature was like a cross between a rhinoceros and a Mack truck. That creature was Tom.
    “No. I think he’ll be fine,” I say, rolling down the window so an impatient Tom can jump down onto the soft sandy dirt of the roadside.
    All three bears have now clustered off to my side of the truck. The largest of the three lurches forward, growling.
    Tom takes a few steps towards them, then stops and begins the incredible metamorphosis that turns him from a cat into an identical brown bear. Except bigger than the other three.
    “Holy cats,” Ruby can’t believe her eyes. “He really can turn himself into anything.”
    Tom, the bear, now turn and runs off into the forest with the other bears.
    “Look! Even as a bear, he still wears his red collar,” she notices.
    “It seems to grow and shrink depending on what he’s become. I think he kind of likes the collar.”
    I smile because he seems happy wandering off with the other animals.
    “Did your cat just run away?” she asks.
    “I sure hope not.” Anyway, I mostly hope he’ll be safe.
    Ruby and I have been so busy watching the bear that we failed to notice a figure walking toward us through the evening mist of the forest. This time, it’s the figure of a man.
    “I don't believe it,” I sputter in amazement. “How did he get here?”
    It’s Jax.

Chapter 15
    A bout six weeks before all this crazy alien stuff began, my uncle decided to spruce up his karate studio and repair a few things around our house. Basic stuff. So he hired a handyman named Jax. When I asked where he found this guy, he said he found him from an ad on Craigslist.
    And, at first, Jax seemed like the world worst handyman. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say the slowest handyman ever. I was sort of surprised that my uber-efficient uncle didn't seem to notice or care.
    Probably because Jax isn't actually a handyman. That was all