The first book in the Wilder Adventures series, 2009

“Live life balls out,” Katie Kramer told herself every night, and even though she didn’t own a pair, she hoped the mantra would keep the nightmares away.

It didn’t.

Death and destruction and horror still dogged her dreams. Until tonight, that is. Tonight she’d miraculously been nightmare free. So when she opened her eyes sometime just before one, she felt…confused. She wasn’t screaming about the bridge collapsing, about being trapped in her car, hanging upside down by her seatbelt fifty feet over the side of a cliff with flames licking at her…

Which meant something else had woken her. And whatever it was, she wanted to kill it for interrupting the first solid sleep she’d had in four months.

There was a fatal flaw with this logic, of course. Because most likely it hadn’t been an it, but a someone.

She wasn’t alone.

Not prone to hysterics or drama, she shook her head in the dark. She’d locked the cabin door. She was safe. Plus, she wasn’t in Los Angeles anymore. After the accident, she’d gotten into her brand-new used car and left town to fulfill her “balls out” motto. She didn’t know what adventures were ahead of her exactly, but the not knowing was part of the plan. She’d gone north because Highway 5 had been the only freeway moving faster than fifteen miles per hour and she’d needed to move fast, needed to get as far from her old, staid, boring, careful life as a tank of gas could get her.

Eight hours later, she’d found herself in the Sierras, where it was real winter. None of LA’s lightweight weather where flip-flops were risky for a few weeks in January, but the real deal complete with snow piled high in berms on either side of the roads and frost on her windows.