On the Water: A Lesbian Paranormal Romance: Monsters of the River's Edge

By Jerica Taylor

Del needs all the cash she can get, so when someone who claims to be from someplace called The Uncanny Society hires her to look into local disappearances, she takes the job. It brings her to On the Water, a club by the river, where she notices a beautiful woman trying too hard to be overlooked, and who goes out of her way to keep Del from the riverbank.
 

Saira entered the human world to retrieve the missing Guard of the Northern Gate at the behest of her Eminence, and return to her underwater home as quickly as possible. But there's a human poking around the river, too intriguing and too stubborn for their own good, and if Saira isn't careful, she won't be the only monster who takes notice of her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jerica Taylor
• Release date: Nov 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201204099

Book preview

Chapter 1

This isn't the first time Del has gone undercover for an investigation, but it is the first time she's been able to use her existing wardrobe instead of having to hit the second-hand shops. It's been a long time since she went clubbing, longer since she actually enjoyed it, but she still has the classic butch uniform of black t-shirt and black jeans. She even had some hair product from those terrible months after the divorce when beer-soaked dance floors and unsatisfying hookups were better than being in her damp basement studio apartment; it had been almost more than she could afford, but she was too old and too broken-hearted to tolerate having roommates again.

She'd found that year that there was actually a lot more she could endure than she ever expected. Great shifts in her life, starting with the first, unmooring one. She had followed Mary to the storage unit, where she had been secretly keeping all of her extravagant, compulsive purchases. Purchases that had put them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, long before Del had happened to stumble upon the first clue something was wrong.

Del made a name for herself taking almost any job she could: construction; call centers; yard work. It was probably how the bespoke-suited woman who said she was with an organization called The Uncanny Society found her. It wasn't much of a leap to jump into amateur investigating; similar to the jobs she'd taken from nosy neighbors─everything from the people on the other side of the fence possibly growing pot in their greenhouse, to parents worried about their kids' social activities, to wondering if spouses were really working that much overtime. If she'd known then what she knew now, about all of the pieces of themselves that people kept from the ones they loved, she'd have been more distrustful of her spouse sooner.

Which is how she got here, to a crowded club on a Saturday night. She could see in the widening eyes of several of the pretty girls at the bar of On the Water that, despite being out of the scene for quite some time, she'd managed to hit the right note to fit in.

The music is so loud it's reduced to thumping bass. Del has always thought this to be a form of hypnosis, as reassuring as a heartbeat, telling your brain to relinquish control to the desires of the body. And at least her body was something that had not let her down, not like her trust, her blind faith in another person—the person she was supposed to be with for the rest of her life—not like her assumption that she had a handle on being a grown-up.

She stretches, rolls her neck. She's not going to get any useful information if she's brooding and tense. She's here to have a good time, to chat with other people here for the supposed same reasons, and to get a sense of the characters here, the regulars, to see if there's anyone the whisper network will urge her away from. Whether people are skittish and nervous because there have been too many new people coming in, or simply because she's a new face.

Del is good at getting people to chat, getting information from indirect questions, but any conversation she's going to have on the dance floor or at the bar is going to have to be brief, shouted ear to ear, and she'd rather get most of the communication through reading expressions, assessing the crowd and the flow of how everyone is moving around.

Del orders a gin and tonic, because it's been so long since she's even been to a bar that she momentarily forgets the kind of drinks there are, and she doesn't want to come off as someone completely out of her depth.

At the other end of the bar, a woman wearing a top with sequins so deep green that they shimmer like mermaid scales sets down an empty glass, and just as quickly is given a full one. A regular then, or a friend of the bartender. She's striking, poised with glossy lips and perfectly styled hair that makes Del want to pull at it until it unravels.

Del watches her walk away, watches as the mermaid scales of her top reflect the lights all the way until she gets to the outer deck.

Chapter 2

The air is warm tonight as it has been for the past several weeks— a boon to the already popular On the Water club, doubling its capacity with the outdoor deck open for the season. Rainbow string lights and citronella torches give the night a bendy quality, as if each moment were both transitory and full of possibility.

Saira's corner overlooking the river remained unoccupied while she was