Spliced: Enhanced

By Kat Stiles

The ability to shapeshift comes with many temptations. For Tyler, robbing a bank is as easy as transforming into a branch manager. He's funded his comfortable lifestyle with ease, but not without notice. 

Tyler is intrigued by his shy but gorgeous new neighbor Ella. When she pops up in the last place he expects, he's not sure she can be trusted. 

As tensions rise around the safety of the general population with regard to "enhanced" individuals like Tyler, a secret organization called OCEI forms, but their motives are questionable. 

Can Tyler escape capture by the OCEI? Will he uncover the mystery of Ella?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kat Stiles
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393372943

Book preview

Spliced

by

Kat Stiles

katstiles.com

Wellington, Texas

Spliced Copyright © 2019 by Kat Stiles

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes. If you are reading this book and did not buy it or win it in a contest by the author or authorized distributor, you are reading an illegal copy. This hurts the author and publisher. Please delete and purchase a legal copy from Kat Stiles.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Chapter 1

There is an art to thievery. I prefer banks, mostly because of all the goodies in the vault. A single piece of jewelry, plucked from just the right safe deposit box of just the right heiress, could fund me for months. But scores like that don’t just happen. To pull it off without getting caught requires surveillance, attention to detail, and planning. Even with the power to shapeshift.

I was one of many enhanced, babies who were genetically modified in utero. It was a procedure my father invented, and I was one of the first successfully enhanced. Others with enough money followed, ultra-rich parents ensuring their offspring were better than perfect. My father had found a way to control genetic mutations, and beyond that, to enhance a single gene or set of genes involved in one functional area. In my case, he had isolated a specific gene involved in adaptation, or survival. It gave me a better immune system growing up—I can recall being sick only twice in my life. The enhancement wasn’t intended to create super powers, it was only supposed to sharpen normal cognitive functions or adaptive behaviors. The super human abilities were only discovered many years later, when the subjects reached adulthood.

Most people viewed the abilities of enhanced as more of a curse than a miracle. Many died, their bodies incapable of surviving the cellular metamorphosis that occurs when a power manifests itself. And that’s when it all came crashing down on my father. Once touted as a genius and the father of new evolution, he became a demon in the public eye. The lawsuits came, an avalanche of them. His company folded and debtors still wanted more. The only thing he managed to save was his Rolls-Royce, which he signed over to me before it all fell apart. I knew it was impractical to keep it. But I wanted a piece of who I was to survive.

I thought of my father often. Everyone assumed he was dead—they found his blood splattered all over his favorite chair in the den, but not his body. I swear it was like something out of an old horror film the day the mansion was stormed, complete with villagers and their pitchforks. They were out for blood, and they got it. The police investigation was a joke—half the country was a suspect. I gave up hope that he had somehow survived, but I