ts time for Your Hump Day Hump!
This excerpt is from The Holy Dark brought to you by me and the fine people of Beautiful Trouble Publishing! Meet Kayla, scientist extraordinair… and the shape shifter Dark *g*

“Stay back!” Kaylla bellowed, looking around for anything to defend herself. “You just wait until my dog gets here,” she barked, backing up the steps slowly. “Princess!”
“First of all, Princess is a name for a female. I am a male. And I am not a dog or a mutt like you presume to call me. I am a jackal.”
“You are going to be dead in a minute! Princess! Princess!”
“Will you stop calling me by that stupid name?”
The man was starting to look angry. Kaylla thought it was too bad he was going to be dead soon, because he was kind of cute.
His hair was wavy and black and it danced around his shoulders as he shook his head at her. There was a chain of some kind around his neck and his hands were resting on his narrow hips. His body was slim but very muscular, very fit, and that con-cerned her. How could she fight him off while buzzing on painkillers with only one arm? And where was her blasted dog?”
“Princess!”
“Oh for the love—” the man snapped at her. Be-fore her drugged eyes, he seemed to melt. As she blinked in disbelief, the man’s form wavered and sank in on itself.
She opened her mouth; but before she could speak there was Princess standing before her, his am-ber eyes staring straight into hers.
Then just as fast, he reverted back and there was the naked man standing in her lab.
“You—uh—you—”
“I am not a dog. I am not a female. I am a male jackal. And most importantly, my name is not Prin-cess.”
Kaylla had to very slowly sit on the steps before she passed out, all the while her eyes never left those of the man who just turned into her dog…jackal.
“My name is Moquaddas Ghameq. It is an hon-ored name, an ancient name that tells of my lineage and my worth as a shifter and as a healer. It is a name that I wear with great pride. Unfortunately, it is also a name that most western civilizations cannot pro-nounce. So you may call me Dark.”
“Dark,” she repeated slowly. “How—”
“Did I find you? Simple,” he explained as he moved closer, stopping when Kaylla scrambled up a stair, almost knocking her stump into the railing in an effort to keep some space between the two of them. “I scratched you when I knocked the zombie—”
“Undead,” Kaylla corrected. “Zombies are the constructs of horror movies, sci-fi books, and video games.” Her voice was shaky, but Kaylla was delighted something coherent came out of her mouth. “They are the undead.”
Dark nodded once, before he spoke again. “When I knocked the undead,” he nodded at her as he modified his wording, “from your person, I purposely scratched your body.”
Her hand went to her chest where there was barely a discernable mark. “It’s almost gone. It was very small.”
“It needn’t be large for me to track.”
“So…you marked me—”
“In order to find you later, Dr. Keller. Once I had dispatched the undead I met with some contacts of mine before I followed you here.”
“Thanks for that, I guess,” she frowned as her mind started whirling with complex thoughts again. “Not that I am complaining or anything, but could you not have attacked a little sooner?”
“A little sooner?” he tilted his head to the side as if puzzled by the response.
“Yes, a little sooner.” She held up her stump. “Sooner, like, before it fucking bit me! I had to cut off my arm, you asshole! You suck as a savior!”
Dark’s eyes widened at her words before he spoke again. “I got there as fast as I could.”
“Not fast enough!” she bellowed, shouting as something else occurred to her. “You know what these things are, don’t you?”
“I was sent by the group of scientists who con-tacted you and—”
“You fucking know what these things are! You all knew!” Anger began to flood through her once more. “Why the subterfuge, Moqad Gamic, or whatever your name is?”
“Dark.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you are called! You knew about those things and you didn’t warn any-body? How could you? How could you all play God like that?”
She pointed to the window. “You could have pre-vented this! This is all your fault!”