Mary out O' the Earth

Mary Out O' the Earth is the story of a forty-year-old widower named David Rigert who falls in love with a woman who is not at all who—or what—he believes her to be. She is, in fact, only half human. It is a story that hopefully captures the awful essence of what it must be like to wake up in dawn's early light, turn to the spouse or lover lying next to you . . . and just catch, peripherally, a fleeting glance of a really wicked set of three-inch fangs receding back into your beloved's gums. But Mary doesn't know that she is half beast or that she has a half-alien mind and possesses enormous physical strength beneath her porcelain curves and red-hair beauty. She doesn't know she is programmed to kill—and worse, to love —so that the imperatives of an alien world might be fulfilled. Or that her "other" self can quash her good half at will—down, down . . . until all that remains when she awakens are its malevolent ghostly footprints on her soul. She doesn't know, but she will learn. And that is when the internal screams begin.