unedited excerpt:
Five weeks later...
As a
connoisseur of reality television, Alden Chrysanthos had seen them all from truckers
to housewives to gator hunters…and enjoyed them all. All of those shows combined, however, didn’t
have a damn thing on the town—and he used that word lightly—that he was in, or the
people—and he also used that word lightly—who lived in it. As a spec-ops warrior, he’d seen a lot of
sh*t, but he’d never witnessed or experienced the likes of this level of
WTF. He didn’t know where in the f*ck
they were, but he knew they’d left “normal” behind about twenty miles and two
hours ago. He missed normal.
As if the
town and its residents wasn’t enough for one mortal man to deal with, there was
that other thing: the wedding. The wedding hadn’t even started good and
already he was sure he never wanted to witness anything like it ever again. This wedding was just wrong on so many levels.
First, there
were the groomsmen…or should he say hostages. It wasn’t the fact that this
wedding featured groomsmen; it was the fact that he and his team were the groomsmen, courtesy of some
shotgun-wielding nuns. Having anyone get
the drop on them was a bitter pill to swallow, but hey, at least they could
still swallow. No thanks to Ms. Mel, who’d
pulled a gun on them and forced them to drink her moonshine.
Being alive
gave him the opportunity to ponder things like the family Thane was marrying
into. He wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he’d
bet good money that every single bridesmaid was certifiable. The first
bridesmaid stumbled in carrying a hound dog.
He wasn’t sure if she was stumbling due to the weight of the dog or
because Ms. Mel had pulled a gun on her and made her taste her moonshine. The
second bridesmaid had a falcon with the wingspan of a pterodactyl, perched on
her shoulder. The third bridesmaid didn’t
have an animal, probably because she had a tray of cupcakes…and a matching
frosting ’stache. And they were going to
be Thane’s sisters-in-law.
Of course,
they were the saner option than the woman who was Thane’s bride. Zelda Dodge who put the b, the u, the c, the k,
the w, the i, the l, and the d in buck wild and the c, the r, the a, the z, and
the y in crazy. Lead zombie hunter for
Smashes to Ashes & Bust to Dust, according to her 1099, her primary duties
included cutting the heads off of zombies and incinerating their remains.
But right now
she wasn’t knee deep in gore. Nope, she
was rocking an eloquent gown while dragging a butt a*s naked Thane, up the
aisle. The second-to-last thing he
wanted to see was the crack of Thane’s a*s, and that was only because the very
last thing he wanted to see was the barrel of the highly-illegal gun
haphazardly slung over the bride’s shoulder.
Alden’s
thoughts were interrupted by the freakishly large reptile that slithered up to
the front and stretched out.
“Is that an
alligator?” Sander asked hopefully.
The man was
probably trying to work out how many pairs of cowboy boots that hide would
yield.
Braughan
corrected Sander before Alden could get the chance. “Komodo dragon.”
“We are so
totally screwed,” Grosvenor said.
“And not in a
good way,” Angel added.
They were totally
screwed but at least none of them had ‘Grosvenor’ as a Christian name, Alden
thought.
Thane was
going to owe them. If he didn’t pay up,
they wouldn’t help him get this farce of a wedding annulled. Of course, the way
Thane kept interrupting the ceremony with his vociferous proclamations of love—for
the bride, not for them—an annulment may have been the last thing their
teammate wanted. Even though he knew
better than to ask, Alden knew he would eventually ask Thane what had
happened. And from the absolute mayhem
surrounding him, he would dollars to doughnuts that Thane’s story would begin
like all WTF stories did: What had
happened was.
