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May 29, 2018

Teaser Chapter for GET BENT!

I am pleased to offer you a small taste of things to come for my new novel:

GET BENT! (the Hybrid of High Moon book 1)

THEY SAY I'M AN ABOMINATION.
I SAY WORDS HURT ... BUT NOT AS MUCH AS MY FISTS.

My name is Tamara Bentley, Bent to my friends, and I’m not supposed to exist. I was born of the forbidden union between a witch and a werewolf, and they’ve been trying their damnedest to hide my existence ever since.

But now my secret is out, and my uncle, the leader of the wolf pack, is pissed beyond belief. In his eyes, I’m something that should’ve never been born. He wants me dead and doesn’t care who he has to sacrifice to get the job done.

I’m far from helpless, though. Not only am I a champion athlete, but I’m strong enough to punch out a bus. Good thing, too, because a rare lunar event is about to increase my uncle’s already terrifying power. I’ll have to call on every last ounce of strength I have to survive the night and save the lives of everyone counting on me.

http://www.rickgualtieri.com/reader/219569
Rough hands reached out to grab hold of me, changing into ragged claws in the time it took the brute in the Phillies cap to close the distance between us.

For a moment, I was too stunned to react, but then he blinked and the dull brown of his eyes was replaced with bloodshot yellow – the same eyes I’d seen staring back at me from multiple hairy heads the night before.

No flipping way!

How? The full moon was last night. It was over, it wouldn’t happen again for...

The questions would have to wait. Whether or not I believed what I was seeing, my reality was about to become seriously hairy.

The man’s ... err, wolf’s claws tore painfully through my shirt and started to drag me from my seat. I instinctively grabbed hold of the table to stop myself from being pulled out and felt its moorings groan in protest.

That gave me an idea.

“Lean back,” I said to Riva.

There wasn’t time to say more. I just had to hope she trusted me. I gave a yank, adding my own strength to my attacker’s, and the table tore free from the wall. I flipped it up and slammed it into the waiting faces of both our would-be assailants, sending them staggering back.

Impossible as it had seemed only moments ago, apparently whatever I had in me functioned just fine in the light of day, too – a handy thing to know.

Pity that the same could also be said about our gracious hosts.

I turned to find the waitress and cook both changing. And I don’t mean their clothes.

Both of them were growing taller, more muscular, and a lot furrier.

“I told you we should have gone to Gib’s!” Riva screeched, huddled in her seat.

“Fair enough. Next time, you can choose where we eat. Stay behind me!”

Both Phillies Cap and Wife Beater recovered quickly and likewise continued to change. Hands became claws, ears became longer and pointier, and clothes ripped to shreds, affording me a far better view of them than I really wanted.

While I’d seen my fair share of horror movies, I didn’t really consider myself a connoisseur. Still, one of the more obvious mistakes in them is that people always stand around gaping when they should be moving. It’s like that old Michael Jackson video Thriller. The girl stands there for like five minutes as he turns into a monster, when she could have been halfway to the next county.

It was a lesson I took to heart.

The two truck stop werewolves were still busy snarling, snapping, and growing extra hair when I charged. I plowed into Phillies Cap, the larger of the two, shoulder-first. I half expected to rebound off the much bigger man – my mind still insisting we were playing by the normal rules. Instead, I took him off his feet, carried him across the room, and plowed into the mirrored wall of the diner hard enough to make the building shudder.

Glass shattered all around us and he let out a great big belch of air. Not satisfied that he was properly dissuaded, I drove a fist into his gut, the oddly undulating flesh giving way as I pushed the contents of his stomach up against his spine.

I backed up a step and he fell to his knees retching, just in time for me to sense movement from behind.

Wife Beater had double-timed his change, seeing that I wasn’t going to stand there and scream like a good victim. Eww, a werewolf with a beer belly – not a good look.

He raced forward and I half turned so that my profile was facing him. At the last moment, I bent low, letting his momentum carry him into me.

Oof! Damn, these things were strong.

I lifted him up in a fireman’s carry, meaning to dump his ass on the floor and put him in the danger position. But I underestimated my own strength and sent him flying instead. Oops.

“Um, I meant to do that.” Oh yeah, some practice was definitely in my future ... if I lived through this.

Fortunately, if there was only one upside to fighting monsters, as opposed to wrestling, there was no such thing as being called for an illegal move. So I, in a rare display of unsportsmanlike conduct, hurried across the room before Wife Beater could get up and planted my foot into his face with a satisfying crunch.

Two down – for now anyway. That left two more asses to kick.

“Bent! Look out!”

Or not.

Yeah, that’s what I’d been afraid of. Seeing that I was no pushover, it was only a matter of time before the other side threw the Marquess of Queensberry Rules out the window and rushed me all at once.

The others weren’t stupid either, not like their hick cousins. There was no grandstanding, no attempt to intimidate me. They simply slammed into me as I turned their way, one high and one low.

It was like being hit by a fur-covered truck.

The wind was driven out of my lungs and I landed atop of the one I’d just given the boot to, the meat in a werewolf sandwich. I didn’t consider myself a prude, but this was one kink I really didn’t see myself getting into. A little hair on a man’s chest was one thing, but even I had my limits.

Mind you, that was the least of my problems right then.

Fire raced up my leg as one of the wolves, the waitress I think, bit into my thigh, her teeth shredding my jeans and probably not doing wonders to the flesh beneath.

Before I could cry out, the one atop me – the cook most likely – slashed my face. There came a spray of blood, almost certainly my own, and my cheek instantly felt like it was on fire.

See if I leave you assholes a tip now.



Buy now for Amazon Kindle
Coming Soon to Paperback and Audio

May 15, 2018

Teaser Chapter - Are You Ready to Chase the Devil?

DEVIL HUNTERS, the long-awaited sequel to Bigfoot Hunters is here!

Deep in the woods, mankind is the endangered species.

Derek Jenner, the Crypto-Hunter, is back! Something is terrorizing the inhabitants of the Garden State, leaving a trail of missing persons and mutilated bodies in its wake. All signs point to the Jersey Devil, a creature long considered a hoax even in the cryptozoological community. Desperate for answers, the authorities summon Derek and his team to investigate.

Now, the hunters are about to become the hunted because what lurks in the forest is more horrifying than they could ever imagine – a nightmare of man’s own making that’s about to set its sights in their direction.

Sadly for them, a corrupt government official will do everything in his power to cover up the terrible secret that lies at the heart of the Pine Barrens … even if it means sacrificing Derek’s team to a fate worse than death.

Check out a small sample chapter below....



“What have you got there?”

“I think these are footprints,” Danni replied, “but it’s kind of weird.”

“What are they from?”

“That’s the problem. I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it’s pretty messed up.” She pointed to a large print in the mud that was more defined than the others. “See this? That looks like a fairly well-defined toe. But then here, that’s a claw mark. And this bump here, maybe an old break.”

“Or a deformity,” Derek said.

“Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s big and heavy. Look how far down that print goes. I’d say two-fifty, probably closer to three-hundred.”

Francis joined them in peering down at the strange tracks. “It’s on the low end, but still within squatch range. Juvenile, maybe? Could’ve had something wrong with it and was driven out of the clan.”

“Not usually their style,” Derek said.

Danni pointed to other parts of the print. “I don’t think so. Look at this indentation in the back. Could be a dew claw. Never seen a bigfoot with one of those, deformity or not.”

Derek leaned over and studied it as well. She was right. It did look like a dew claw, but more reptilian than anything. The rear of the foot was similar to the prints of a megalania, a giant monitor lizard thought to be extinct. They’d tracked one in New Zealand about three years back, but this print was far smaller. Definitely not a twenty foot dinosaur throwback. It was as if this print was cobbled together from different unrelated species ... which probably meant it was. “A fake?”

Danni stood up and wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans. “Could be. I mean, the way the ground is depressed looks like this came from a real foot, but then there’s the shape. If it is a fake, then whoever carved this was either really good at what they do or really lousy.”

“Oh, man!”

Derek and Danni turned toward Francis, but the big man didn’t appear to be in any danger.

“Sorry, guys. Leaned against a tree and put my hand in something nasty.”

“It’s a bog,” Danni replied. “Pretty much everything here is nasty.”

“You’re telling me.”

Derek started to laugh, but was interrupted by the sound of his radio beeping.

He motioned the others over and raised the volume so they could listen. “Derek here. Tell me you got something, Mitch. Over.”

“Something is an apt description.”

“Come again?”

“I called Arthur. The results were in. I had him read them to me over the phone. Then I had him read them again.”

“I take it they were interesting.”

“That’s just it,” Mitchell replied over the radio. “I’m not really sure what to make of it. I asked him to rerun the sequence to make sure it’s not a glitch.”

“What did they come back with?”

“Human,” Mitchell replied.

The three hunters shared a glance, as if they’d suspected all along.

“Kinda, anyway.”

“Wait, hold on,” Derek said. “Define ‘kinda.’”

“That’s exactly it. Normally I’d expect high eighties or nineties, even with a contaminated sample. This came back as a sixty-three percent match with Homo sapiens.”

“That’s not very high at all.”

“No, it’s not. Problem is, the rest of the results are all over the map, and that’s not even including the non-organic material in the sample.”

“Non-organic?” Francis asked. “So what you’re saying is the samples were fucked.”

“Maybe.” Derek could hear the frustration in Mitchell’s voice. “I don’t know. From what Arthur read to me, it sounds more degraded than contaminated, which doesn’t make sense either. When you guys are finished chasing ghosts out there, I need to get back to the lab and read it myself.”

“Not so sure about ghosts. Danni found some prints.”

“From what?”

“Hate to throw this one back at you, Mitch, but we’re not sure. They’re either faked or whatever made them is some god-awful mess that I don’t even want to imagine.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Start wrapping up on your end. We’ll head back, regroup, and double check those results. If it looks even remotely possible that we’re dealing with human DNA, then I think we hand this off to the cops where it belongs.”

“Roger that.”

“We’ll see you in a while. Over.”

“So we’re calling this turd hunt?” Francis asked.

“Yeah. I’m not seeing much reason to do otherwise. It’s a shit show out here. Let’s head in before we end up covered in leeches or something.”

“What about those prints?” Danni asked. “There’s one other thing we haven’t considered about them.”

“What?”

“If they are fake, then why bother making them all the way out here where nobody is likely to see them?”

Derek had to admit that was a good question, but he didn’t have a good answer to go along with it ... at least not yet. Still, she was right. In their line of work, one didn’t so easily dismiss potential evidence, even if later it turned out to be faker than a three-dollar bill. “Take casts of the best. We’ll take a look at them in the lab. Maybe in better light something will stand out.”

Danni nodded. “On it.”

She turned back toward the prints, while Francis took off his pack and began rooting inside of it. He knew the big man would be fishing out his handheld camera so as to get some footage on the way in. That way the journey wouldn’t be a complete loss.

He was about to turn away to ask Danni if she needed any help when he heard Francis zip up his pack, loud in the quiet woods.

Too loud.

It took Derek a moment, but then he realized the forest had gone completely silent around them.



Available now for:
Amazon Kindle / Kindle Unlimited
Coming soon to paperback and audio