Raines of Fire: The Alexa Raines Chronicles Read Online Free Page A

Felicia, I wanted to let you know, but—well, it’s.  Um.  Complicated.”
    Felicia rolled her eyes.  The years had been kind to her—she was still the lithe, sensuous beauty that Alexa had fallen in love with, back when knowing another woman was something that only happened on VHS video tapes with soft lighting and bad music.  Alexa wanted nothing more than to kiss her, to take her to the nearest hotel room, to touch her and fuck her and make the ten years disappear and wash away her sorrow with pure ecstasy.  She settled, instead, for, “Can I buy you a drink so I can explain what happened, at least?”
    Ten years ago, Alexa’s work took her to a little town called Westpark, in Texas.  She’d been tasked with assassinating Big Jim Campo, one of the bigger dealers of the area who’d been expanding his operations to include prostitution and racketeering.  Felicia had been a stripper at the club he frequented when he was in Westpark.  She’d just started—that much was obvious when Alexa walked in, and saw her giving Big Jim a lap dance.  Or trying to—she hadn’t yet mastered the art of moving about in six-inch stiletto heels.  Still, she could tell that Big Jim liked this girl, perhaps because she was so new and sweet.  Alexa befriended Felicia, and asked her for a favor.  “Could you, y’know, maybe get me onto Jim’s good side?” she’d asked.  “I’m kinda hard up for money, too.”
    After Big Jim had been disposed of, Alexa called Michael Rollins and told him she was getting out of the business.  Michael, as expected, only said, “Very well, Miss Raines.” 
    They rented a house together, barbe cuing and sipping vodka spritzers and learning how the other liked to be touched, how to kiss, where to brush and where to press and where to pinch.  The local fertilizer plant was a good place to work—there was steady money, so Alexa got a job there, to blend in better with the locals—someone who always had money but no job would be too conspicuous in a town where the richest person had to shop at Piggly Wiggly’s.  And life was good, for a few years.  Felicia went to school and worked at a diner, they bought a car, and then everything blew up—literally.
    There was an accident at the plant.  A stray spark, a plume of gas, whatever it was that exploded, was bad—Alexa took three weeks to resurrect from this.  Michael had driven out to Texas in a marathon seventy-two hour drive to creep into the wreckage and steal her body from the ashes before the officials could begin their body count.  He kept her safe, in a converted shipping container outside Los Angeles, for three weeks, while her body reassembled itself, regenerated what parts had been lost, and finally, became alive again.  But by then, Felicia had already thought she had buried her lover.
    “You wouldn’t do her any good going back to her, now,” Michael had said.  And Alexa had agreed.  Life went on for her.  She restarted Raines Adjustments, and Felicia passed from her mind like all of the other lovers she’d had over the centuries.
    Now, sitting next to her former lover at the bar, Alexa didn’t tell her that, of course.  “I couldn’t do that to you after three weeks of being presumed dead,” she said. 
    “It never occurred to you that I might have needed you?” Felicia said.  “I lost you, two friends, and my brother in that accident.  I would’ve been ecstatic to see you.”
    “I—I couldn’t know that,” Alexa said, feeling guilty for the first time in a long time.  She tilted the rest of  her drink—scotch, neat—down her throat, hoping that the burn would take some of it away.  It didn’t.  If anything, the guilt was more intense.  “So what are you doing now? Into Wicca?”  She hoped Felicia wouldn’t take the sudden shift of topic amiss. 
    “I used to be,” Felicia said.  “Then Edgar took over.  He—I don’t know, for most of us Wicca was mostly a social thing.  We liked