Night Shepherd

By Sharon Kae Reamer

In pursuit of her doctorate in biogenetics, Juliette von der Lahn likes to work late, alone, at the University of Cologne biology lab.

Her work also includes her 'professional hobby': her pursuit of arcane creations. Her magic comes by way of her connection to the Schattenreich, the family real estate in a sheltered corner of a modern-day Celtic Otherworld. Her specialty? She clones hybrid animals with special properties.

On this particular Friday night—late—a korrigan appears in the lab. The korrigan, one of a race of mythical fairy-like creatures, demands that Juliette clone the bugul-noz or night shepherd, a one-of-a-kind creature out of Breton Celtic legend. Since before time came to be measured, before things began to be written down, he existed. Rumored to be big, scary-ugly, and mostly harmless, the night shepherd made woodland paths to guide humans gone astray to safety.

Now it seems the night shepherd has perished.

But these mythical creatures don't just die, they transform. And they get hungry.

Juliette doesn't have the first clue about how to genetically reconstruct a creature that doesn't even exist in the waking world.

But with the veil open and the irresistible scent of human blood in the air, she better learn fast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terrae Motus Books
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386235354

Sharon Kae Reamer

Sharon Kae Reamer studied geophysics in Texas. She then just up and moved to Germany to start a family and pursue a career as seismologist at the University of Cologne. Her research includes a geophysical investigation of ancient Tiryns, Greece, but neither she nor her colleagues has any real hope of answering the question: What killed the Bronze Age?  Sharon writes speculative fiction from her home on the outskirts of Cologne when she manages to chase her cats Loki and Finn off the keyboard.   

Book preview

NIGHT SHEPHERD

A SUNDERED VEIL NOVELLA

Sharon Kae Reamer

Terrae Motus Books/ Overath, Germany

Table of Contents

Title Page

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

About the Author

Also by Sharon Kae Reamer

Copyright © 2018 Sharon Kae Reamer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Terrae Motus Books

Oppelner Str. 10

51491 Overath

Germany

https:/www.sharonreamer.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout © 2016 BookDesignTemplates.com

Night Shepherd. -- 1st edition, October 2018

Breton legends speak of Korrigans as doomed human souls, unhappily trapped through tragic death to wander the earth.

~Patricia Monaghan

~ooo~

Part I

Something Lost

FRIDAY NIGHT LATE, at the University of Cologne. The place was dead quiet. Had been for hours.

Something lost, something found, something made and something bound.

The chant ran through my head. I didn’t know whose voice was speaking or where it had come from. I shook my head. Too many hours on the bench this week.

The gene sequencer, occupying a square-sized chunk of granite-topped counter, hummed to the end of its program. It made a series of sleek beeps and then went on standby. Sitting next to it, I put the finish to my handwritten notes.

Old-fashioned? Yes. Necessary? Yes. Secure? Somewhat, as long as no one found my combination college-ruled and gridded spiralblock. And even then. They’d have to decode my shorthand. The diagrams might be easier to decipher. Graphic displays are second only to math as a universal language.

I hopped up from my office chair and turned to the standalone deep sink to wash my hands. I took a step backwards when I realized a creature sat on the sink, dangling her legs. She was smallish, not much bigger than my brother Theo’s cat Snowy, skin creamy with a pale greenish glow, hair dark with darkish red streaks - or were they purple? They seemed to pulse and change. Disproportionately large feet swung out and back together at the end of those legs. Not large-ish, but large. They were finely boned delicate feet, just much too long for the cat-sized woman-thing on the sink. She stared up at me with her moon-face, not smiling, not frowning, just curious and…wanting. What did she want?

Hi, uh…where did you come from?

You don’t know? she said, in Breton, the ancient language I knew; a Celtic language variant that had borrowings, mostly from French.

I spoke a form of it, passed down from my parents and their parents before them and on back, with a curious family dialect that was a regional mixture from both upper and lower Brittany where my family had roots. The von der Lahns were a curious mixture of Breton-French and German. We’d mostly dropped the really archaic language bits, though. It got too many strange looks from the modern-day Bretons when we tried to speak it.

But the archaic stuff did get a good workout when speaking to Otherworld inhabitants like the one sitting on the lab sink in front of me.

I tilted my head just a fraction and smiled. Answered her in the same tongue. You didn’t come through the Opening. I’d have heard about it.

Other ways than that, she said. Wardens don’t know everything.

She was referring to us. The von der Lahns had been responsible for rending the veil separating the real world—the waking world—from the Otherworld, which we called Ande-dubnos, and now we were stuck with the chore of gatekeeping it. This had all happened when my three siblings—my two wombmates and Brevalaer who came later—and I were still in diapers. That didn’t mean we had no responsibility. We did. And plenty of it.

And we were old enough now to take our turns as defenders of said Opening, which was to be found in the back of a bar-pub-bistro (or Kneipe in German) called Skogkatt. Located on our property and just a few kilometers (as the crow flies) from Burg Lahn, our cozy castle near the Rhine, Skogkatt belonged to my father and his twin brother and my mother. It didn’t get a lot of human traffic because the locals were afraid of it.

I didn’t blame them.

At least there was decent food and drink (and sometimes music) to be had while all the defending was going on. We were charged with making sure that the things, non-human and, at best, part-human, that wanted to come through were the kinds of things that we wanted to come through.

Okay. You came in from a different place. I am interested in that. Intensely. But what do you want?

Now her look of longing changed to something fierce. Anger and sadness all mixed together. The expression disappeared after an instant. But it scared me. This creature would not have made it through the Opening. Not even close. She wasn’t one of the Folk, who we called the Tud, which meant the same thing in Breton. Or was she?

She looked similar in size and appearance to one of her fellow creatures, the only