CAGI Finalist #9

Title: THE ALIGNMENT
Genre: Commercial fiction with supernatural elements
Word Count: 127,000

Query:

United by one family, hunted by another. He's the only one who can heal her. She's the only one who can redeem him.

Liv Gilchrist hopes moving halfway across the country to Black River, Montana will be an escape from her nightmares. After her baby daughter died in her arms and her husband left without explanation, she needed a new beginning. She didn't know she could be running headlong into her own demise.

Trey Bevan also has a tragic past, but he's chosen revenge as his route to healing. His powerful family murdered his wife and baby, and he’s spent the past fifteen years killing the assassins they send after him. It's hardly a challenge anymore. His rage has mutated into a worse enemy—apathy. But he's become too lost in his own bitterness to care.

Trey finds a reason to care when he crashes into Liv on her first day in town. His enemies spot them together and focus on her. If they kill her, they’ll expose him—supernatural abilities and all. He’ll have to kill her himself. With the plan of her death in motion, the next assassin attacks, and Trey falls off the roof and is knocked unconscious. When he awakes, he falls for Liv, and realizes she is the missing piece in an ancient design.

A celestial alignment triggers an ancestral Bevan spell created just for them, binding them with undeniable attraction. With nothing left to lose, Liv chooses to become a willing participant in his world. One cube of dissolving magic and one psychic connection later, Trey crafts her into the perfect companion weapon to confront his family and end their reign. Liv learns her tragic past was merely a stepping stone in her destiny, and Trey discovers the secret to his revenge lies within her.

First 250:

He’ll never find me here. If he does try to hunt me down, rural Montana is the last place he’ll look. Yet I didn’t decide to drop everything and move here for that reason. It was something else entirely.

I stand on the shoulder, staring at my deflated tire. To drive fourteen hundred miles only to blow a tire in the last fifty might be considered a bad omen. Another tractor-trailer rumbles by, changing to the other lane so it doesn’t pick me up like one of the scrubby plants my car has collected on its front grill. The big trucks don’t stop, but every car and pick-up has since I pulled over.

“The tow truck’s on its way,” I’ve hollered into twenty lowered windows, mentally recording each driver’s physical description and license plate just in case he’s a serial killer. Those details would only be useful if I escaped—an unlikely idea out here. Any sicko could drag me off the road, dump my body in the bushes. No one would report me missing. No one would miss me. My friends in Chicago don’t expect to hear from me again. They all know what happened. Why I’m out here.

I open the trunk to free my spare, trapped under a three dimensional puzzle of my belongings. Like luggage unloaded by airport security, it will never go back the same way again, and there’s no empty space in the backseat or passenger seat for overflow.

I don’t notice it until it’s already on me—a black motorcycle headed the opposite direction, its engine winding down like a swarming wasp.