Shifting Blame: WorldGate, #1

By Jessi Hammond

Most of Summit Creek's residents get on well with the Others who fell through the WorldGate eleven years ago.

Constable Ben Sanders and Kear Lakeside, a witch, deal with the incidents that happen when they don't.

Like Gibson's dead sheep, which he insists were killed by a certain bear shifter.

That bear shifter has a different opinion. And she has her own problem for Ben and Kear to solve…

(note: this is a CLEAN, PG book)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201333751

Book preview

About this book

Most of Summit Creek’s residents get on well with the Others who fell through the WorldGate eleven years ago.

Constable Ben Sanders and Kear Lakeside, a witch, deal with the incidents that happen when they don’t.

Like Gibson’s dead sheep, which he insists were killed by a certain bear shifter.

That bear shifter has a different opinion. And she has her own problem for Ben and Kear to solve…

Shifting Blame

Eleven years ago, in the small town of Summit Creek, New South Wales, a Gate between worlds appeared. In the seven seconds it was open, sixty-three known non-humans were dragged through and stranded when the Gate snapped shut. These Others included giants, shapeshifters, witches, dryads and merrow.

To help them assimilate into human society until they could go home – if a way could ever be found to reopen the Gate and send them home – the Australian Government set up the Department of Non-Human Affairs and declared Summit Creek a restricted zone.

Most of the humans and Others in the Creek do their best to get along with each other.

Some don’t even try.

One

Kear Lakeside stood on the corner of Grant and Tirrima Streets, waiting for Constable Ben Sanders to pick her up. The corner was a five-minute walk from the house she shared with three Others, but she figured it was safer not to have a police car show up outside the house. Most humans in Summit Creek accepted the Others now, but Kear knew there were some people who were still suspicious, even scared, of those who’d come through the WorldGate eleven years ago.

Like we had a choice, she thought morosely. Like most of us aren’t wishing the scientific team the Department of Non-Human Affairs had set up to try and re-open the Gate would hurry up and do it so we can go home.

Kear sighed, glancing up and down the street. Grant wasn’t that much different to Collins Road, where she lived. The same neat houses, made of wood or brick, set in the middle of tamed lawns, trees, bushes and flower beds behind wood paling or wire mesh or brick fences.

The same neat gardens, filled with plants that were both familiar and totally different – there were no virikendras here! She missed the tall stemmed plants with their tiny sky-blue globes of puffball flowers. Her mother had grown them all around their small cottage, their colour vibrant against the red-brown bricks. The closest thing to virikendras here were wattles, but they were mostly yellow or red. Last summer, Kear had