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    The Dysfunctional Holiday: The Dysfunctional Chronicles, #5
    The Dysfunctional Holiday: The Dysfunctional Chronicles, #5
    The Dysfunctional Holiday: The Dysfunctional Chronicles, #5
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    The Dysfunctional Holiday: The Dysfunctional Chronicles, #5

    By Hadena James

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    About this ebook

    It’s nearly Thanksgiving, which is enough to cause anxiety for anyone planning a big family gathering. In Nadine Daniels’ world, it’s a reason to panic. Pregnancy hormones, exploding houses, missing friends, and six Great Danes with identity issues are just the start of the problems. 

    As Nadine works to find out who is trying to kill her friends and family, she uncovers a vile plot that threatens to tear apart her entire world. She must battle to keep everyone safe and sane through a Thanksgiving meal that might be everyone’s last. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHadena James
    Release dateMay 7, 2015
    ISBN9781513045443
    The Dysfunctional Holiday: The Dysfunctional Chronicles, #5

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      Book preview

      The Dysfunctional Holiday - Hadena James

      Prologue

      Just when I begin to think that my life is semi-normal, the holidays happen.  Not the small holidays which include warm weather and sunshine and do not require family, but the big holidays.  Particularly, Thanksgiving, which is all about family and cold weather and being grateful.  Sometimes, it’s very hard to be grateful.

      Filling In The Gap

      Four months ago, the men that really run my company decided I needed a vacation.  A very long vacation.  Essentially, they retired me without slitting my throat.  Knowing the men that work for me, I’m pretty happy about the no throat slitting part.

      One might call it a coup, but if it was, it wasn’t a very good one.  I still get a paycheck every month from them.  I just don’t have to go into the building.  My office has been taken over by Anthony, a very capable mercenary, who also gets to call himself CEO. 

      Originally, the idea was that I needed to spend more time with my two closest friends: Alex Zeitzev and Kenzie Reynolds.  Since Kenzie is pregnant with Anthony’s child and Alex has started freaking out over everything related to marriage, it really wasn’t a bad idea.

      Two weeks into it, I was working my way through all seven seasons of Ancient Aliens mixed with re-runs of Tabitha Takes Over.  I do require some variety, but my husband decided that I should use the time for some self-improvement instead.  I didn’t think I needed self-improvement, but I often found that I was in the minority and when I finished Ancient Aliens and started UFO Hunters, he signed me up for cooking classes.  He said that it wasn’t really about improving myself, it was about finding something I was passionate about and getting out the of house.

      I’ve taken classes in pottery, painting, sketching, creative writing, cooking, and poetry.  To say I sucked at all of them would be an understatement.  For example, I set the kitchen on fire in cooking class.  My thrown pottery piece was supposed to be a mug and everyone thought it was an elephant.  In painting class, I wore more paint than the canvass.  In sketching class, they brought in a dog to teach us basic forms, but the dog went nuts and peed on my leg because he could smell my own dogs on me. I wrote a poem for my poetry class:

      There once was a kid named Sid,

      who got hit in the head with a garbage can lid.

      It gave him a concussion,

      which pissed off the Russians,

      and that lead to nuclear war.

      It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the worst thing ever written by a poet.  However, my poetry teacher banned me from returning to her class.  I guess she doesn’t like limericks. 

      After three nights of practicing the violin, Zeke decided that musical instruments weren’t a good idea for me either. The Danes however, seemed to love it as they howled along with the beginners’ songs.  Which lead me to take a class in sewing and running a sewing machine over my thumb the first night of class, it was also my last.

      That leaves the judo class and my current situation.  Deciding the fine arts weren’t really my thing, Zeke signed me up for judo.  I made it a week.  During my third lesson, I was supposed to kick a bag, I missed and hit the wall behind it, breaking my foot.  After the incident, my foot was sore, but it didn’t feel broken, so I kept walking on it, right up until this morning, when it turned a strange purple color.  Zeke rushed me to the ER.  They wrapped my foot in a plaster cast, gave me crutches, and told me to keep it elevated.  I didn’t even make it out of the hospital before tripping on the crutches, so they also gave me a walking boot.  It’s better this way.  The cast and walking boot are heavy, when the cast comes off my calf muscle will be able to crush aluminum cans. 

      See, I broke a bone or two hitting the wall, walking on it broke a few more.  Now, Zeke is making arrangements to have Thanksgiving at our house.  It’s Friday.  I’m hoping that by the time Thursday gets here assassins will have snuck in and planted mines so that my family has to go to Golden Corral for lunch.

      It’s not that I don’t like my family.  I do.  I just can’t handle all of them at one time: my four brothers, their spouses, life partners, their children, Alex, Sebastian, Kenzie, and Anthony are coming., My six Great Danes will be in attendance and, of course, my mother.  If I had been really smart, I would have hit the wall with my head.

      Tuesday

      Anthony was sitting on my couch crying.  This should have been a rare thing. Anthony is a hard as nails mercenary of undetermined age, but it wasn’t.  As a matter of fact, it was becoming a very common sight.  Kenzie is pregnant, very pregnant, it looked like she would be dropping out quadruplets any day.  The pregnancy was going easy enough for her, except the hormonal changes that made her evil one moment and angelic the next, followed up with cravings for ice cream and fried onions. 

      It was not as easy for Anthony.  He was suffering from Couvade’s Syndrome, also known as sympathetic pregnancy.  He was also having issues with hormones and weird food cravings and physical changes.

      Zeke was doing what he could to help our friend through this tough emotional time.  It seemed Anthony had gone out for ice cream for Kenzie and bought a cake for himself.  He now felt guilty for eating the entire cake in less than two hours and this guilt had brought him to tears.  In all the time I’d known Anthony, I’d never seen him eat cake.  The very premise was weird to me.

      Kenzie was not crying.  She was polishing off every scrap of cooked meat in the fridge without bothering to heat it up first.  This included the chorizo casserole that Zeke had cooked the night before.

      You ready for Thursday?  Kenzie asked between forkfuls of cold casserole that made me feel slightly queasy.

      I have been told that if I step foot in the kitchen, both my legs will be broken and not just my foot.  I informed her, repeating the threat Zeke had issued the day before.  I had six microwaves in the utility room that had all died under strange and mysterious circumstances. 

      Good, then dinner will be edible, she smiled as she shoved in another scoop of food.

      Should you be eating all that?  I was careful with my voice to not sound accusing.

      I’m eating for two, it requires a lot of food.  Kenzie defended herself.

      Yes, but it seems like when you eat, Anthony gains weight.

      He also has no sex drive, which is a serious problem, because the last couple of weeks, it is the only other thing I have thought about.  Food and sex or food with sex or sex with food, I’m not real picky.  Kenzie lowered her voice.  The doctor says both are normal.

      Why did you whisper that and not the other?  I whispered conspiratorially, but unsure why.

      Because the word ‘normal’ upsets him.  Kenzie shrugged.

      Apparently, so does cake.  I commented.

      Yeah, don’t mention any dessert related words, he’s very sensitive about them.  The doctor warned him yesterday that he might suffer from post-partum depression as well.

      I have never met a man who actually had sympathetic pregnancy.

      As I understand it, a lot of men do, but few are severe, which is why the word ‘normal’ is a problem word.  In Anthony’s case, it’s severe, which means it isn’t ‘normal’ and he’s always been ‘normal’ in the past.

      He has never been normal.  I don’t even know how old he is.  When I was a tween, the Russian Mob hired a German mercenary to kill me.  The mercenary was Anthony.  He was an adult with honed skills at that time.  He had zero accent and spoke perfect English.  He decided he couldn’t kill a kid,

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