“No God commands me, yet I answer to a higher law than yours. My heart does not beat, yet it still feels. Only her word rules me, and only her smile warms my blood.” – J. Carlton, Nosferatu Harpy of Baltimore

Strange, Dead Love is a new supplement for White Wolf’s Vampire: the Requiem RPG. It is guide to the themes and props of paranormal romance, custom-fit for the World of Darkness, specifically Vampire: the Requiem. This book features a collection of world shards, ready-made chronicles with their own plot hooks and rules. As well as advice for storytelling romance, including guidance on games for two.

Strange, Dead Love was written by Jess Hartley, Monica Valentinelli and Filamena Young. You can read the Flames Rising interview with the developers Russell Bailey and Eddy Webb from October where we took fan questions about the book.

Flames Rising has an exclusive sneak preview of this new book with an excerpt called A Plague for a Dowry.

A Plague for a Dowry

Pitch

This is a shard about sex, politics, repression, and maybe even a little bit of love. You’ll be playing rising stars in a city of Kindred who have a long history of making as many deals in the bedrooms as in Elysium. Now the Prince has, for whatever reason, declared that love, sex, and romance are illegal and punishable by death. Your Requiem is about to get tricky.

Mood and Theme

Secrecy, lust, and the thrill of illicit love should be the hallmarks of this chronicle. After all, one little law and the threat of death is hardly enough to make a city full of Kindred suddenly change the way they operate. Now it’s just a matter of being sneaker about it. It’s business as usual, just behind locked doors. The ever-present threat of blackmail makes everything that much more dangerous, and that much sexier.

Description

A year ago, a Sanctified zealot with some crazy ideas about humanity and the cleaving of Kindred from human behavior entered the city. He declared that any sort of contact between Kindred that wasn’t a demonstration of power or devotion was a blasphemy. The Bishop found him overly zealous, but harmless.

It’s also long been known the Prince is heartbroken. No one can say exactly what caused it, but the wounds have been apparent in the lines of her face for nearly a century. Something shattered her, and she’s an empty shell most of the time. Despite the Bishop’s declaration, the Prince seems to have taken an interest in the zealot’s teachings. After a number of private meetings and confessions, the Prince made this strange belief city law:

“For the betterment of the city, any and all romantic or sexual behavior between Kindred is to be forbidden. There is nothing but suffering in the Kindred experience, and the mimicry of human blessings such as love and pleasure are a slight in God’s plan. Therefore, there shall be no more love, no more pleasure, and no more marriages.”

Now the city is in a quiet panic. Clearly they can’t ignore the way they’ve been doing things forever. The indignity of the new law is second only to the very real threat of death should they not follow it. Any liberties must now be taken in secret.

Character Considerations

A number of characters would fit nicely into this chronicle, but here are a few ideas to really spice things up.

The Pretty Face: Before the law, she was arm candy. Just a pretty thing Embraced for her looks and passed around between Kindred of power in a fashion that bordered on humiliation. Now, though, she’s got something she didn’t have before: power. With the new law on the books and her old benefactors addicted to her attentions (and possibly her blood), she’s got leverage over them. After all, she can expose any and all of them as law breakers. While she too is guilty, being able to point fingers goes a long way with tyrants.

The Childe: The Prince is his sire. He was Embraced long after the heartbreak, and doesn’t know the cause of it, but he is desperate to ease that pain in his sire’s soul. Worse, thanks to the influence of that zealot, the Prince has spiraled further into self-loathing and depression. No else is close enough to try and change things, and any real gestures could get him killed under the new law. That’s probably not enough to stop him, though — after all, a childe’s love is sacrosanct.

The Penitent: She knows something about the zealot that would shock the Prince and the city. It’s something so terrible and so twisted that it would cast into doubt everything he’s said and done to influence this city. The problem is that she’s under conditioning that prevents her from even hinting at what she knows. She must find a way to expose the zealot for what he is without ever telling anyone else what she knows or what they should be looking for — no easy task.

Allies and Antagonists

Aside from the Prince and the Sanctified zealot, the city should be alive with freedom-loving, political, erotically-open Storyteller characters. Taking care of business was a business of its own, and while not everyone in the city should be a sex addict, a majority of the city’s vampires should be at least insulted that such a limitation would be forced on them.

Clandestine meetings supported by local Carthians intent on resisting the laws happen in many places throughout the city every night. The Circle of the Crone use Crúac to hide their blood bonds and emotions. The Ordo Dracul, limited in any research they might be doing on Kindred-to-Kindred social interaction, are up in arms. Even members of the Lancea Sanctum question the wisdom of forcing this sort of dogma on a city that might strain their covenant’s standing.

Stories

Blood Disease: Something is slowly killing the Kindred in the city: some sort of mystical disease that is passed by blood contact from one Kindred to another. Ghouls can’t suffer from it, and humans don’t carry it. The only way for it to be spread is by illegal sexual interactions between Kindred, so tracking down its spread and source is going to be next to impossible for city officials. It will be up to the coterie, working outside the law, to garner enough Kindred trust to stop the spread of the plague.

The Ties that Bind: Maybe most Kindred don’t realize the sheer number of “criminals” this city has due to the new law. Perhaps if there were a way to illustrate just how many members in good standing are at risk for death by the law, the Prince could be bullied into changing her mind. One answer is to trace the blood ties and bonds, and rumor has it that there are certain Crúac rituals or strange alchemies that can follow the lines of blood. The coterie must find the rituals, trace the complicated network of blood ties, and hope for the best.

Owner of a Broken Heart: As if things weren’t bad enough, the zealot starts preaching against nomads and shortly after, the Prince declares an open blood hunt on any foreigners attempting to make contact with the city court. Could it have anything to do with that long lonely look in her eyes? It might be worth asking some of the local Gangrel, but is it safe to ask?

You Can Pick Your Family

In this shard, characters can opt to join or leave blood lineages for the purposes of Blood Ties, Blood Sympathy, and the Taste of Family rules (Vampire: the Requiem, pp. 162-164). This shard also uses slightly stronger forms of those rules. Using these rules changes, a character may be part of multiple lineages.

To leave a lineage, a character must spend a dot of Willpower, and shed at least one point of Vitae. Immediately, all relevant characters may make Blood Sympathy rolls to know this occurred.

To join a lineage, a character must spend a dot of Willpower and ingest one point of Vitae from a member of the lineage in question (subject to normal Vinculums and addiction rules, as in Vampire, pp. 161-162). The member of the lineage whose blood is shared must spend a point of Willpower.

Blood Sympathy no longer carries the fifty-mile limit; characters may experience one another’s most potent moments from any distance. In addition, family members need not spend Willpower to force sympathy. The social bonus for Vinculums becomes +4. When using Taste of Family, a single success can identify blood from a known lineage.

Strange, Dead Love will be available in both eBook and Print formats at DriveThruRPG.com.

Related posts:

1. Strange Dead Love Now Available For Vampire: the Requiem!
2. Into the Void SAS Review
3. Vampire The Danse Macabre Preview

Coburn’s been dead now for close to a century, but seeing as how he’s a vampire and all, it doesn’t much bother him. Or at least it didn’t, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead—but not dead like him, oh no.

See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like brains. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And nocturnal. And more pissed-off than a bee-stung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector—after all, a man has to look after his food supply.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of this upcoming horror novel by Chuck Wendig.

Chapter One: The Vampire Awakens

The blood crawled through tight channels and shunted cracks like a rat in a maze. It wound downward through shattered concrete. It crept down along a length of rusty pipe.

Eventually it found an opening and dangled free in darkness before becoming unmoored and falling through shadow.

The first drop landed on the man’s nose. Which did nothing. The second dotted the flaky, cracked flesh of his forehead. That also did nothing. But the third drop. The third drop was the magic drop, tumbling
out of darkness and falling upon his desiccated lips, from there easing down into his frozen, arthritic maw, moving past rotten teeth and touching the dark dry nub that once was a tongue.

When the blood touched that blackened stub, it came alive with a sharp sound: the sound of a spoon back cracking the surface of crème brulee.

The tongue twitched. Swatches of crispy tongue-flesh fell away like flakes of char. Then the tongue did more than twitch: it flapped, flailed, seeking, needing.

The mouth widened.

The drops of blood from above became a steadier flow. The tongue shot out from the mouth, extended far, too far, impossibly far – and like a child catching snowflakes, it caught the blood.

It wasn’t long before the blackened tongue was blackened no more. Now it was pink, bright, stained with red. The mouth opened wider as the blood now fell as an unsteady rain. The sound of an animal’s cries and the coppery, greasy taste on Coburn’s tongue cut down through his dreams like a machete: he reached for them, the animal’s cries mingling with a child’s cries, the memory of wallpaper and linoleum replaced fast with a wall of darkness and the feel of stone.

He lurched forward. His spine cracking, his bones as brittle as sticks.

Blood fell from above. He cupped his hands (they were hard to move, the fingers like the stiff legs of dead bugs) around his mouth and made sure not to miss a single drop of the sweet stuff. He was a junkie, a blood junkie, a vampire who thrived on this stuff and he hadn’t had it in – well, he didn’t know how
long, but judging by the condition of his body, it had been a long fucking time.

What fell in his mouth wasn’t enough. Not nearly. He needed more. Would kill to have it (and had in the past, many times, too many times to count).

He tried to speak, but found his voice lost in the dead puckered flesh of his throat, his vocal cords naught but withered strings. Coburn needed the blood. And so he decided to climb.

Coburn moved as a spider. Fingers mooring in the cracks of broken cement and crumbling brick, hauling himself up while still craning his neck so as not to miss any of the tiny waterfall of blood. When he found its source – the end of a rusted sewer pipe – he nursed on it like a baby.

It still wasn’t enough.

Coburn pried his mouth from the blood – a task that borrowed from his last vestiges of will, a task that set off alarms and screams in his head: Go back, you’re going to miss it, you need it, you fucking ape you can’t exist without it, you’re a moron you deserve to die – to die for real this time, to die for good.
And yet he persevered despite the cat-calls of his own worst survival instincts, letting the human mind – the one with reason and sense and the ability to see beyond a few drops of blood – take over past the reptilian monster mind that wrenched at the puppet strings.

He swung out, using what little strength his dead body still possessed, and swung along pipe after pipe, a nightmarish subterranean jungle gym.

Then: he smelled it. A faint breeze from above. On it, the scent of blood. And a curious smell of rot.

Echoing down through the hole again came the animal’s cries, a kind of panicked bleating. Coburn hoisted himself through the hole, his mouth wet with blood, his jaw tight with hunger.

The human mind noticed that nothing here made sense. It was like that old game: One of these things is not like the other, one of these things does not belong. But it wasn’t just one thing. It was a metric shitload of things. It was all things.

Coburn hoisted himself up into an old movie theater that tickled the back of his memory somewhere behind the wall of hunger that dominated him. The theater lay in ruins – the ceiling was half-caved in, the scent of dust and mold sat heavy in the air. The screen itself hung in tatters. Rows of seats had fallen to disrepair.

But the thing that really twisted the noodle was the deer. And the two men eating it. Animal was a whitetail buck. Not standing so much as leaning against the broken row of seats, its head thrashing, the creature crying out some sound between a child’s whimper and a beastly grunt. One man slumped against the creatures haunches, biting into it the way another man might bite lustily into an apple. The other stood at the front, pawing at the whitetail’s face, fruitlessly snapping at the thing’s neck – but the animal, still alive (though weakened), kept jerking his head away from his attacker’s mouth.

Coburn didn’t understand one lick of what was going on. And frankly, he didn’t give a rat’s right foot.
Because sweet goddamn was he hungry. With that, he moved to feed. The deer no longer interested him. The blood of beasts was functional, but barely.

The blood of men, however, was king.

Coburn, his skin still tight, still brittle, his bones and muscles still uncertain, stepped up atop a row of seats and almost fell – but he quickly regained his balance and walked across the seat-tops toward his prey.

He came first to the man chowing down on the deer’s ass, wrapped his hands around the fool’s skull and snapped the head back like it was a Pez dispenser ready to give out some delicious red candy. The smell hit him in the face like a thrown brick. Rot. Decay. A kind of septic infection.

We don’t drink from the sick, said that horrible little voice inside Coburn’s head but really, hell with that voice, and so he bit down anyway.

Black blood thick as motor oil filled his mouth. It tasted of pus and of pain but worst of all it tasted worthless. See, humans have a spark of something. Coburn didn’t care to ruminate on what that spark was: the divine, the soul, a glimmer of sentience, a social security number, whatever. Fact was, life was bright and alive inside every man, woman and child, and that glory dwelled—nay, thrived—in the blood. It
was why the blood of a human was infinitely better than that of a beast: animals had an ember, a spark, but only a fraction of the total fire.

The blood of man offered the whole package. Life in claret sweetness. This blood had none of that. It was dead. Inert. Diseased. Black as tar and worthless as baby shit. Coburn’s head snapped back, recoiling with the disappointment felt by a starving man who just bit into a plastic fruit. His victim struggled, hissing, the hole in his throat gurgling and bubbling.

The man turned and lunged for Coburn with long, yellowed nails. His face was half-caved in (calling to mind a rotten pumpkin), a gobbet of super-fresh venison still laying flat on his tongue (the meat covered in tufts of deer hair).

The man was dead.

Dead-dead. Not dead like Coburn was dead. But real dead. Double dead. Shit.

The vampire had little time to parse. The gurgling corpse lunged at Coburn, letting go of the deer. He wrapped his hands around Coburn’s throat and turned the tables: Coburn thought he’d be doing the feeding, but this dead sonofabitch was hungry, too. And strong.

That’s when things went sideways.

The deer, sensing opportunity, kicked out with its back legs. A hoof caught Coburn’s rotting assailant in the temple, and it went through the fucker’s head like a broomstick through a block of butter. The buck’s leg impaled the rotter’s skull, and whatever bullshit facsimile of life managed to animate him before was now gone, and the hands around Coburn’s throat went slack.

The whitetail was none too happy about this and continued to thrash. It bucked its head and drove one of its antler points through the chin of the other feeder trying to get a taste up front. Coburn backpedaled, almost tripped over a seat as the deer panicked. He watched, equal parts starving and stymied, as the deer struggled—it had stuck its attackers at both ends. Antler under one’s chin, foot through the other’s head.
And it couldn’t get free.

It was then that Coburn’s veins tightened. His dead heart stirred: not with life, but with a hollow paroxysm of need and want. He stood. He reached out. He pressed his fingertips together, forming them to a single point.

Then Coburn corkscrewed his hand fast—faster than any human could manage—into the deer’s side, up under his
ribcage, and grabbed hold of the creature’s heart and crushed it like it was a pomegranate.

The vampire removed his fingers, licked them clean, then pressed his face tight against the hole and drank. It tasted of grass and musk and animal stink but he didn’t care because at least it wasn’t black blood, dead blood, useless blood.

The blood filled his throat, and for a moment, all was right in the world.

Coburn is coming, November 2011…find him at Amazon.com.

About the Author
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter and self-described ‘penmonkey.’ He sold his first story when he was 18. After working in the computer and role-playing game industries he began scripting TV and film projects, including a horror film script which won him a place at the prestigous Sundance Screenwriter Lab 2010. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with a wonderful wife and two very stupid dogs.

This preview was provided by and posted with permission by Abaddon Books.

Related posts:

1. Chuck Wendig returns to Abaddon
2. Dead Stay Dead Novella Review
3. Pallid Light: The Waking Dead Preview

This preview and the images were provided with permission from the publisher as part of FlamesRising.com’s continuing coverage of Steve Jackson Games Week. Today, you’ll find images of upcoming Munchkin Games including Munchkin: Axe Cop, Munchkin Zombies 2, Munchin: Conan and a few other Cthulhu-related treats.

From Steve Jackson Games to our dice bags, there will be an attractive plethora of custom and jumbo die this Fall for Cthulhu Dice, Fairy Dust and Munchkin Jolly. One color in particular stood out in our minds. We regard it as watered down red, but you’ll probably look at it and go… Pink? Pink Cthulhu Dice? With SPARKLES? It’s almost as if they know we’ll lose sanity just by picking one of them up. Well, if that doesn’t cause you to go a little insane, the giant foam Cthulhu Dice (pictured above) probably will. Instead of marbles? Think Silly Bandz in the shape of Cthulhu. Oh. My.

Speaking of losing one’s sanity, the latest addition to their Chibithulhu line is none other than Zombie Chibithulhu in the most adorable frightening undead creature this side of R’lyeh. It has a pink brain! In its belly! Ia! Ia! (Cultists can pick one up in October…)

From Munchkin headquarters to your gaming table, several supplements are set to debut. The Munchkin Conan booster pack and Munchkin Zombies 2: Armed and Dangerous will be available in August 2011; Munchkin: Axe Cop is coming to your local game store in October. Rather than give an in-depth critique on each card, we’re going to post the images from each one without comment. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep silent!

Voice your opinions in the comments below. Please, be sure to let us know if you want to see more Munchkin Zombies 2: Armed and Dangerous previews. That request we can definitely fulfill.

Munchkin Conan Preview

Munchkin Axe Cop Preview

Munchkin Zombies 2: Armed and Dangerous Preview

Related posts:

1. SJGames Week: Interview with Munchkin Illustrator John Kovalic
2. SJ Games Week and Munchkin 10 Year Anniversary Contest
3. First Look at Munchkin Zombies

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an excerpt from Night Veil, the second novel in the new Indigo Court series written by Yasmine Galenorn. This dark fantasy story debuts on Tuesday, July 5th. In this preview, you’ll read a brief introduction to the world and a part of the first chapter.

Night Veil: The Beginning

Myst led her people into the shadows and ice, and there they hid, sheltered in the depths of lore. The Vampiric Fae were pariah, kept a dirty secret, shamefully debasing the entire realm of Faerie. And so in furtive silence, the Host fed and drank deep and did rend the flesh of its victims and feast. But their thirst was unquenchable, and it was then that Myst discovered one of their newfound powers: Members of the Indigo Court could drink from the souls of the magic-born…

With this discovery, a vision for the future began to evolve, and the foundation of terror began…

Night Veil: Chapter One

The great horned owl sat in the oak.

I could see the bird from my window as it huddled in the sparse branches, trying to protect itself from the snow. I longed to join it, to strip off my clothes and turn into my owl self, to fly free under the haunting winter moon, but the weather was harsh and cold. And Myst was out there, hiding in the forest with her people, waiting.

And somewhere, hidden in her mists and shadows, Grieve is there, captive, caught in Myst’s web. Can he still possibly love me? Can he still be saved from the blood that flows through his veins? How can I let him go, now that we’ve found each other again?

I opened the window and leaned out, glancing down at the yard below. The snow gleamed under the nearly full moon, a crystal blanket of white flooding the lawn. The Golden Wood—or Spider’s Wood, as I called it—was aglow as usual, with a sickly green light that I’d seen every night since returning home to New Forest. A thousand miles and years seemed to separate me from my former existence, although it had been only a couple of weeks since I arrived back in town. But in that short time, my life had turned upside down, in every possible way.

The wind called to me to come and play and I closed my eyes, reveling in the feel of the breezes lashing against my skin. My owls shifted, urging me to fly. The tattoos—a pair of blackwork owls flying over a silver moon impaled on a dagger—banded both arms.

Slipping on my leather jacket and gloves, I cautiously climbed out on the shingles, making sure that the snow that had built up didn’t slip, sending me sliding to the ground, but it had turned to ice. I scooted until my back rested against the window, then brought my knees up, circling them with my arms, and nestled as best as I could against the cold.

As I stared up into the oak, the great horned owl let out a soft hoot, stirring my blood. Over the past month, he’d taught me to shake off the fear of falling, to soar through the unending night turning on a wing, catching mice in the yard, while always, always, keeping an eye on the forest.

You are Uwilahsidhe. You are magic-born. You must keep watch for Myst, he constantly reminded me. The Queen of the Indigo Court seeks to destroy you.

I raised one hand in salute, the snowflakes softly kissing my skin, and he hooted again, a warning in his tone.

“What is it?” I whispered. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Ulean, my Wind Elemental, swept around me like a cloak, answering for him. He fears for you. There are ghosts riding the wind tonight, and the Shadow Hunters are out and about. There will be death before the morning.

More death. More blood. My stomach churned as I thought about the four killings reported over the past two days. One had been a child. All had been torn to bits, eaten to the bone.

I gazed at the forest. What were Myst and her people up to tonight? Who were they hunting? The bitch-queen was ravenous and without mercy.

There has been so much death over the past few days. They are terrorizing the town and now everyone fears them, even though they don’t know from whom they run. I leaned against the gentle current that signaled Ulean was embracing me. She had been my guardian since I was six years old, bonded to me through ritual, a gift from Lainule, the Fae Queen of Rivers and Rushes.

And they should fear. Myst won’t just go away. She is here to make her mark and conquer. She is here to destroy. Ulean caught up a skiff of snow and sent it into the air, spiraling around me.

I glanced back inside at the clock. Seven P.M. Another two hours before we were to meet with Geoffrey. Finally, after five days of silence, the Northwest Regent of the Vampire Nation had summoned us. Five days after we had rescued our friend Peyton from Myst. Five days after I’d lost Grieve. Five days during which the Indigo Court had rained hell on the town, killing eight people.

The owl hooted again and as I glanced in his direction, a shadow of movement caught my eye from below, over near the herb gardens.

Crap—something was rooting around down there. Not an animal, so what was it? Another glance over at the Spider’s Wood showed nothing amiss, but we couldn’t take any chances.

Ulean, do you know what that thing is?

A moment passed and then she drifted gently around me again. Not one of the Shadow Hunters, but I have no doubt it belongs to the Indigo Court. Myst is attracting the sinister Fae.

I leaned forward, trying to keep it within my sight.

I need to know what it is. We can’t take a chance on letting it prowl around our land.

* * *

Night Veil is available now at Amazon.com.

This excerpt was provided by and is being published with express permission from the author.

Related posts:

1. Night Veil Review
2. Author Yasmine Galenorn on Writing and a Contest
3. Vampire Week: Night Myst Review

ANYA SOBCZEK (SUB-CHECK) is a snarling science major with an arm full of Darwin tattoos. Her brother OWEN is a sensitive young thing in a coven of teenage occultists. The Sobczek sibs have always been brutally competitive, but now that Owen’s blood has started BUBBLING with ancient tentacled abominations, their rivalry’s about to enter a vast new dimension of cosmic terror…

In 2010 Artists DREW RAUSCH and AARON ALEXOVICH hurled their infectious horror/comedy hybrid ELDRITCH! into blazing combat in DC Comics’ final Zuda webcomic competition. After several centuries it emerged, dazed and confused, with the word WINNER indelibly etched on its forehead.

It was promptly buried in an unmarked grave.

Today, ELDRITCH! has been shocked back to life. Eldritch! #1 is now available at DriveThruComics.com for only $0.99!

Check out this preview of the first few pages of this comic Click on each page for a larger view:

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Preview of The Crimson Pact Anthology

The Failed Crusade

Written by Patrick M. Tracy and Paul Genesse

Part One: The Rusted Vale

News of our victory came not in the happy shouts of the freed multitudes, but in the groaning voices of the animate dead. Ours was a victory that none would confuse with triumph. The best half of us lay broken within the Rusted Vale, the rear guard left to puzzle out the events that had been no more than far-off echoes within the smoke and crashing iron. We knew only that we had finally won, that the Crimson Pact was redeemed, that we could all go home. Tired as we were, no man lifted a fist to celebrate. No Blessed Woman smiled. No church Catechist recounted the litany of our good fortunes. The cost had been too high, the wager of battle too awful. In that moment, winning didn’t seem to matter. It would not be long before we found that even the brief illusion of victory would tear away like fog before the wind.

We had to reanimate the dead to learn the terrible truth. When we could find corpses whole enough to take the enchantment, that is. Most of them lay in torn, unrecognizable chunks no bigger than a man’s finger. Our front line troops had been destroyed to a man. No living soldier remained to tell the tale. How had our enemies, at the moment of their apparent defeat, disappeared into a rolling, living explosion of acrid fire? What twisted plot had allowed them to lure us in, only to annihilate us and make good their escape? Only the dead knew.

The landscape, a blasted waste of flaming corrosion, would never again support life. Nothing wholesome remained. Trees were charred skeletons; grass had turned to ash; even the rocks were glazed with black, tarry soot that wouldn’t wash away. The comrades we brought back had known torment no human mind could bear. Wrenching them back into their broken bodies was a crime we will spend our lives trying to forget. They screamed until we were forced to pulp their heads with the burial spades, providing us with nothing but fodder for night sweats and drinking binges.

You begin clean. You begin with fine intentions and a cause. The ending is always burnt black, broken promises strewn about with the dead and all you had hoped to do slipping through your hands like the steam of your breath in midwinter.

Some of us were learning these truths for the first time, most of us merely being reminded. The Spirit Coaxers with their black candles and their guttural chants summoned the ghosts back into the broken vessels of our fallen friends. For those who had the power over death’s threshold, there was never so ill-favored a day. As bad as The Day of Burning was for all of us, it was the worst for the Spirit Coaxers.

Nothing could be done. We needed to know what they’d seen at the front, what had happened, how things had gone so utterly wrong. A few of them had seen the last awful moments. From beyond death’s veil, they remembered. Curse the gods, but they remembered it all.

It fell to me, General Cruek Ostor, to hear the gasped words of the dead. I carry every word verbatim, an entire army of nightmares within me, loose-ranked and mutinous, hollow-eyed as my own reflection after these many sleepless nights. Fragments of all the dead live inside me.

Withered Tree

Written by Suzzanne Myers

We are twenty, walking our ponies down a black road under cover of night, knee to knee. We are ghosts slinking down from the mountains, sneaking through Prison City, twitching at every sound. We don’t have a choice. We must eat, we must live. The world before the Apocalypse was a complacent world, a world in which choices were many and too easily made. Now the only choice is how you want to die.

I am the only one of us who’s not afraid.

Jav kicks his pony out of the shadows ahead and trots up to me. We pause in the dark while the others draw up around us. Jav looks us over quickly, counting the heads, then jerks his chin up the road behind him. “We’ve got trouble. There are eyes on the street.”

I follow his gaze, past the long shadow of the roofline above us, past the sign on the corner and the fuel pumps with their hoses lying in the dirt. The filling station is dark inside, the window glass broken. The door hangs from its hinges and trash is piled up around it.

Then it comes; not slowly, the way black of night fades into shades of morning grey, but there—quick, a flash, a glint of light on metal. It might be just the moonlight. A reflection on a countertop, an empty coffee can. Or it might be a rifle barrel.

Of the Breaking of Stars

Written by Chris Pierson

[Transcriptor’s Note: I have endeavored to present this text in as close to accurate condition as can be reasonably expected, given the age of the original chronicle and the peculiarities of the original dialect. I have changed the wording only where it aids in the understanding of adages and idioms, and to standardize the names of those people and places that already exist in the histories.]

6 Charkani, Year of the White Crow
Another star died last night, the third this year. There was no warning, and I was busy in my workshop when it happened, testing the affinities of the pure watersilver that Batosh brought out of the ruins of Khet, so I did not see it happen. But I heard it, of course—who could not?—the sound of a thousand mirrors cracking, high up in the sky, and I came running out to the courtyard in time to see the cloud of shards dissipate into the aether.

I have instructed the household slaves to make fast what they can, to bring in the livestock and keep the children from straying outdoors. They complied without question, and not just because it is their place; all have heard the tales of four months ago, when the previous star died and the crystal rains fell upon the harbor of Duqra, on the far shore of the Unquiet Sea. What befell the folk there, the great pieces of starglass smashing the city’s palaces and walls, reducing its harbor full of proud dromonds to so much flotsam–it sticks in the mind.

And now, in the last month of the year, another star is gone. Unprecedented–the last time one disappeared was in the time of my grandsire’s grandsire. Now three in one year? It is more than a little troubling, but I have no theories yet as to why this has happened.

As soon as I could, I opened the roof of the observatory tower and trained my dispector upon the debris of the star–Othras, in the middle of Argath the Horseman’s sword-blade–and I took measurements of its movement for old Shai to study. When I gave them to him, the blind old man told me the rains might fall upon us, but the greatest shards would land in the mountains to the north. But I heard doubt in his voice, and fear that his command of numeromancy is not what it once was. I worry that he might have made an error.

Better a knife in your sheath than one in your ribs, as my grandfather used to say, so tonight I, my family, and the slaves will seek shelter in the cellar of our household. I hope I am seeing shadows in the sunlight, and Shai’s figuring was right . . . but I will not bet our lives upon it.

Promotional Trailer for The Crimson Pact

The Crimson Pact Volume 1 is available at TheCrimsonPact.com or any major eBook store. This preview was provided and published with the express permission of Alliteration Ink.

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FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a preview of The Zombie Feed Volume One. Several authors penned stories in this zombie anthology. Three of the stories you’ll find in this debut anthology from The Zombie Feed are available for you to read below.

Hipsters in Love

Written by Danger Slater

“Goddamn it, we’re out of chai tea!” shouts Vikki DeMure.

There’s the sound of boxes being thrown. Plastic forks spilling onto tiled floors. A microwavable spinach quiche hitting the wall with a splat. I know it’s a microwavable spinach quiche and not a low-fat yogurt blueberry muffin because the low-fat yogurt blueberry muffin sounds more like thump.

Vikki steps back into the cafe, her mascara smeared by sweat and frustration. Looking very smoky. Very cool. Urban Rob stops strumming his out-of-tune guitar.

“Viks, you’re looking hot,” he says.

“Go fuck yourself, Rob,” she snarks.

Urban Rob plucks a few sour notes and ignores her.

“Well, we all knew this day was coming,” I go, trying to be congenial, but not caring too much. I hate chai tea.

“And who are you? Nostradamus?” she spits at me like a cobra.

“No…” I say.

“…And I’m not cleaning up the mess you just made in there,” I add, feeling validated.

“We should start a band,” Rob interrupts, playing the same three chord riff over and over and over again.

“Jesus, you two are giving me a headache.” Vikki rubs her temples.

“Maybe you’re turning,” Rob tells her.

“Not funny,” she replies. She sits on the counter and crosses her legs, almost painfully, as her pencil-thin jeans don’t leave much room for movement. “When are Marco and X getting back?”

I look at my watch; Snap, Crackle, and Pop tick around the clockface. I got it from a cereal box. “It’s only been an hour,” I go.

On the table in front of me is a months old copy of Newsweek. The cover reads in red bold-font APOCALYPSE! I haven’t read the article yet. I?m not too into reading. Unless it’s Palahniuk. Then it’s… tolerable.

“I hope they find some Chai Tea. I can get kind of cranky when I don’t get my caffeine fix,” Vikki says.

“Really? We hadn’t noticed,” Rob chimes in, not looking up. She sneers at him, her grapefruit lips parting like the Red Sea; her smile an ocean of piranhas.

From the boarded-up windows, the sound of pounding fists continues. Like rain spattering a sidewalk. I find it relaxing—the clawing, the scrapping, the soft guttural moans of the outside world. Never mind the fact that those fists are attached to bloodlusting zombies—the ravaged undead city, forever pulsing, trying to get in. I suspect they want to eat our brains. Or tear us to shreds. I suspect they want to come in and destroy the last bastion of civilization we’ve built here in this coffee shop. Who knows? It’s like music—the pounding. Just like drums. Maybe we should start a band. The last band on Earth. There?d be no one to listen to it.

It would be so ironic.

Not Dead

Written by B.J. Burrow

The smell of vapo-rub, flowers and baby powder mingled to create a perfume of death. Flowers clustered along the counter in front of the windowless, beige wall. A muted television hung opposite the narrow bed. The hospice nurse dimmed the lights.

Age and cancer had leached the flesh against Julie Barrette’s skull. The combination of tight skin, exposed teeth and bulbous eyes transformed her into a hobgoblin, complete with wispy spikes of white hair. Pain turned her onto her side and curled her legs. Her lips ran dry and her tongue turned to sandpaper. The nurse occasionally looked up from her book to soak the sweat off Julie?s forehead with a gray towel.

Father Carey sat in the chair next to the bed. He cleared his throat and opened his well worn Bible, which easily fit into his pocket, his favorite over all of the ones he had been gifted over the years.

He read, silently, the marked passage, but hesitated. He looked up and said, “Could I get a glass of water?”

Julie’s granddaughter, Laura, cried with a hand over her mouth. She wore a pink ribbon pin over her right breast. Julie?s daughter, Joanie, stood next to Laura, her eyes dry, her face slack. She wore a black dress—what Julie would have called, not two days before when she still had her voice, ‘a mourning muumuu.’

Joanie nodded. She looked to the nurse, who met Joanie’s eyes briefly before returning to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Joanie turned to Laura. “Get Father Carey water.”

Laura nodded, but did not move. Her hand fell from her mouth and she hugged herself. She said, “Ice?”

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

Still, she did not move.

Father Carey and Joanie stared back at Laura. Even the nurse raised her eyes. Laura said, “What if I miss… it?”

The sentence hung in the cloying air over the bed.

“I mean… I want to be here when she passes.”

They all looked to the nurse. The nurse lowered her eyes back to her book.

Father Carey found their eyes on him. He looked to the bed, listening to Julie?s deep gulps for breath. He licked his dry lips and said, “These things take longer than one expects.”

He had not performed Last Rites since The Change.

Since people had stopped dying.

Since people had stopped dying and simply continued.

A Shepherd of the Valley

Written by Maggie Slater

The low-lying fog across the tarmac made it diffi-cult to be certain, but the figure moving toward the tower limped like a roamer. James Shepherd lifted his binoculars—it was a girl, a young girl, wearing a jacket so large its cuffs hung over her hands and the waist almost down to her knees. She favored her left leg, or perhaps her ankle. No doubt she’d been walking on it unconsciously for weeks, maybe even months.

I can fix that, Shepherd thought, and it made him smile. It had been a while since a roamer wandered onto his ground space. He’d have to give her a good name. A sweet name. Perhaps Esther. Little Esther, he thought, and tapped in the command for Peter to intercept and incapacitate.

Luke was also in the area, not a hundred meters off by Hanger B.

Adding Esther would make his group an even dozen, and that too made Shepherd smile. He pulled off a piece of masking tape and pressed it beneath the others on the control panel. With a marker, he wrote her name.

Twelve was a good number. A holy number, if the Good Book was right. Peter, Matthew, David, John, Paul, Mary, Luke, Bartholomew, Joseph, Martha, Mark, and now Esther. Yes, twelve was right.

As he watched Peter tromp toward the newcomer, Shepherd heard a strange noise over the radio. At first, he thought it might be a breeze caught in Peter’s microphone, but it grew steadily stronger. The moan reached him across the speakers in the air traffic control tower just as the little red button next to Peter’s name began blinking ferociously.

Not a moment after that, Luke’s light started flashing, too.

Shepherd stared at the lights, hardly remembering what they were meant to indicate. It had been so long since one had flashed.

He snatched up his binoculars and looked out at the three figures, now visible and moving toward one another. As he watched, the girl lifted what he’d mistaken for a long stick at her side and pointed it at Peter’s head.

The girl was alive.

Shepherd’s hands leapt for the microphone button. “No, wait!”

The blast of a shotgun echoed through his tower speakers.

Panicked, Shepherd twisted the knob for Luke’s frequency and slammed the speaker button again. “Wait! Don’t shoot.” He stabbed his fingers onto the keyboard to com-mand Luke to stand still. “Hold your fire. They won’t hurt you. I’m in control.”

The speakers buzzed. “Who’s talking? Where are you?”

Shepherd froze at the sound of the voice and lifted his face toward the window again. “Penny?” His voice cracked when he said her name.

“Hold on,” Shepherd said, ducking under the control panel to plug in the video line for Hanger B’s security camera. A flood of grey light filled the dusking room behind him as he scrambled back into his seat.

The girl stood some twenty yards away from the hanger, and Luke was less than half that distance from her, his back and the glint of his bolted metal spine visible on the video feed. The girl’s shotgun was leveled at his chest. The video was too grainy to see much else in detail.

Shepherd leaned in until the static from the screen crack-led at the tip of his nose. “What’s your name?” He couldn’t even be sure of her face shape, let alone her features.

“I’m not telling you shit until you tell me where you are.”

* * *

The Zombie Feed Volume 1 is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from Apex Book Company.

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Born of the U.S. government’s 1928 raid on the degenerate coastal town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the covert agency known as Delta Green spent four decades opposing the forces of darkness with honor, but without glory. Stripped of sanction after a disastrous 1969 operation in Cambodia, Delta Green’s leaders made a secret pact: to continue their work without authority, without support, and without fear. Delta Green agents slip through the system, manipulating the federal bureaucracy while pushing the darkness back for another day-but often at a shattering personal cost.

Ten years ago, everything changed. It’s time you found out how.

It’s January 2001. The Delta Green agents code-named Cyrus and Charlie get the call: A young boy dead and buried for years has reappeared, healthy and happy, as if no time at all had passed and the disease that killed him had never been. The family thinks it’s a miracle, but Delta Green has seen too many miracles turn to madness. Cyrus and Charlie must discover what horrors lurk behind this one. The mission brings them to the brink of apocalypse-to the edge of the revelation and destruction of Delta Green-to secrets and terrors at the heart of reality itself.

Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly is a new novel written by Delta Green co-creator Dennis Detwiller. The book is finished. It’s been reviewed, revised and edited. Now Arc Dream Publishing is holding a Kickstarter project to raise the funds to publish it.

Flames Rising posted an earlier excerpt from Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly on April 30, 2011.

Here’s another glimpse.

Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly is by Dennis Detwiller, © 2010.

Two Tickets, Please

Initial conspiracy cell contact: JFK International Airport, Queens, New York. 40.64 N/73.97 W latitude/longitude. Approximately 2,416 miles from Seattle: Sunday, January 30, 2001, 3:41 P.M. EST

Sunburned and squinty, Curtis McRay stepped into the worst winter New York had experienced in thirty years. During his first vacation in five years (alone, thank you very much), McRay had sat on the beach at St. Thomas like some sort of plant, absorbing sunlight and slowly changing colors-and drinking. Much to his chagrin, he found he had forgotten how to have fun. He knew only how to unwind. Drinking every night, baking every day, sleeping in and eating out. Now he was back from fantasyland, looking red and out of place among the snow-bleached natives of the Big Apple. At least he still had about a week before he was due back at the Buffalo office. Time enough to wind himself back up to the breakneck speed of federal law enforcement.

It had to be ten below with the wind chill, but JFK warmed his heart. People were being ticketed, yelling at ticketers, double-parking, unloading in the no-unloading zone, and entering unmarked, unlicensed cabs. New Yorkers always reminded him of the endless chattering of the monkey cage at the Bronx zoo. Little furry people hitting each other and flinging dung at innocent passersby. Without tails, of course, but basically the same. This sensation did not make McRay feel as one might think. It wasn’t a bad sensation. It was a warm, cheery feeling: I’M BACK IN THAT CAGE, THANK GOD. He looked goofy, standing there, a gawky man in a light coat amid a sea of freezing pedestrians. His weasel-like face, topped with shaggy brown hair, was broken in a grin even though his bulky Buddy Holly glasses were coated with fog. He stood for a while in the nasty weather and breathed it all in: New York.

“Home,” he contentedly sighed. A Pakistani cab driver (apparently licensed) threw a chunk of ice from his windshield at a black cab driver (obviously unlicensed) who had stolen his fare by knocking ten dollars off the outrageous price for a ride to Queenswhich, needless to say, they were already in. All this took place a few feet from a bored transit cop who considered an interesting piece of snot he had removed from his nose with a meaty pinky. Nothing came of the ice attack. The projectile bounced off the black driver’s windshield as he laughed and pulled away with two terrified elderly passengers in the back seat. They looked like they had just leapt to life from the pages of Our Town.

McRay lifted his luggage (he was slipping, you never let your luggage out of your hand at JFK, much less out of sight) and felt the wind cut into his sunburned face like razors. Someone shuffled up uncomfortably close behind him from the Delta terminal. McRay felt a single cold finger settle at the base of his skull. He spun comically.

“Bang,” Poe said, face empty of emotion.

Donald Poe lowered his left hand, poised in the shape of an imaginary gun, to an imaginary holster at the hip of his battered camouflage jacket. His heart jumping wildly, McRay began to laugh and let his hand drop away from his shoulder rig. There were some perks to being a fed; carrying a pistol on a plane ride was one of them. It had long since gotten to the point where he almost felt naked without it.

“I could have shot you, you old dumb hick,” McRay laughed in a plume of steam, and then clapped the huge man on the back. Poe stared back impassively, but a hint of a smile bled through. The hick was indeed getting old, but he looked solid enough to play professional football. Age had not yet consumed his natural bulk or turned it to fat, something that seemed to occur after retirement in most men. That was a good thing; there weren’t too many in the group like Poe.

You didn’t retire from the group. No one retired from the group. Maybe that’s what keeps Poe going, McRay thought.

To McRay, Poe would always look like some sort of aging professional wrestler. Dressed in camo, boots and a John Deere cap, the squarely-built giant looked exactly like the type of gun-toting militiaman that had the FBI all in a twist. But he had humped it in the jungles for his country in the Sixties and had spent his fair share of time in “the dark” after his return. Hell, they both had had seen their share of some seriously spooky shit. McRay was only a little more than half the bigger man’s age but the two had spent some of the most harrowing moments of their lives together.

POE EMPTYING THE CONTENTS OF A MOSSBERG SHOTGUN INTO A GLOWING MAN. The memory swam up in McRay’s mind like an untethered balloon drifting by in the dark, and he tried to push it away. RONALD VALIANT WAS THE MAN’S NAME, the quiet voice in his head intoned. VALIANT WAS LIKE SUPERMAN BECAUSE THERE WERE THINGS THAT GAVE HIM POWER, THINGS THAT CLICKED LIKE BUGS, LIKE GIANT MAINE LOBSTERS, LIKE.”

Enough. It was hard to think about the specifics. It was the little things that got to you.

They had paid their debts, or so he liked to imagine. But it was never over, once you were in; it was never over until you were over. It had taken McRay nine years to learn that. Poe had taught him by example. Donald A. Poe “Charlie” to those within the conspiracy-was the model agent of Delta Green.

“I don’t see how you could have shot me,” Poe replied quietly, in a gravelly voice. The burn scar on his cheek rippled in time with the words. “I shot you first.” Someone laid on a horn so hard and so long McRay was sure some mechanical failure had occurred. Poe didn’t even flinch.

“Let me guess: bad news?” McRay sighed. Suddenly he was glad he had cashed in a month of vacation time. He had planned on visiting New York City for two weeks before drifting back into the Buffalo FBI office. Now, it seemed, he would be on an op instead.

“Nice tan. Yeah, I got the call yesterday. Came through Benton. Two tickets to the Opera. We’re on a plane in,” Poe glanced at his huge silver watch, “twenty-two minutes.”

“So what’s the deal? Missing person? Creature feature?”

Poe grabbed one of McRay’s bags, the big one, like it was filled with tissue paper, and walked back into the Delta terminal. McRay followed. Poe said something but it was lost in the mechanical slam of the doors.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Found person.’”

“I didn’t get you.”

“I said, ‘Found person.’”

“What?” McRay stopped in the terminal and people fluttered by, maneuvering around him with contempt in their eyes. Poe stopped and turned to look at him, his voice even and quiet. Around them the world went on and on, secure in its own importance.

“Michael Lumsden, age nine, was found asleep in his parents’ house six days ago in suburban Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. The boy had been missing for more than ten years.”

“Ten years? Age nine?”

“Yeah,” Poe muttered back, his voice dropping. Something like fear was in his tone, but something else was there as well, something like certainty. McRay watched closely to see if he was setting up one of his rarely seen jokes, but his icy blue eyes stared back empty of any humor.

“So?” McRay laughed nervously. “I guess, good for the Lumsdens, right? Who took him?”

“Cancer took him. Michael Lumsden died at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital on October 5, 1990, of leukemia. He was two days short of his tenth birthday.”

It didn’t matter how long you had the job, the ops still had a way of punching through anything you placed in their way. Work, life, the world meant nothing in the face of what McRay and Poe confronted. You never got used to it. It never became routine. Maybe that was its draw. Why so many had signed on and so many had died.

And there were always more bodies coming down the chute.

Poe turned and continued to check in. McRay stood for a moment, watching the man disappear into the crowd.

“That’s all I fucking need,”he said to himself. “Another night at the fucking Opera.” He followed Poe.

The Clipping Service

Official notice of Class One paranormal event: The Country Club, outside Mount Weather, Virginia. 38.98 N/76.50 W latitude/longitude. Approximately 241 miles from Queens: Saturday, February 5, 2001, 1:12 P.M. EST

The thin man approached the security checkpoint and presented his credentials. A guard considered him with the piercing stare of a sentry on the edge of enemy territory.

The thin man stood stock still with his hands on the desk as the guard slipped the badge through the machine. A green light lit on the device.

“Hand on the scanner, please, sir,” the guard ordered. The thin man knew that below the plain-looking desk a submachine gun was pointed directly at his crotch. If the light did not come on, if the chime on the palm scanner did not sound a Ding!, the thin man would not be long for this world. He would be cut in half by automatic fire in the middle of all this splendor and perfect architecture. If his bona fides were not up to snuff, he was dead. Even if there were some kind of computer glitch, he would be an ex-member of MAJESTIC and of the human race, in that order.

The warmth of the light from the scanner ran up and then down his palm, followed rapidly by a loud DING! Something loosened in his chest.

Not today, he thought.

“You are free to pass, sir,” the guard said, and his voice held a distant note of regret.

Fucking black-ops DELTA psychos, Martin Glenn thought. A buzzer sounded as the guard unlocked the tan double doors, and he passed through.

Perched precariously on the edge of an immense desk covered in papers, Charles Bostick glanced up as Glenn entered.

“Marty, what’s up?”

“I just got this from the national clipping service. It looks like another Class One event, something for Yrjo and the boys. Ross is going to want a piece of it, too. We’re lucky the facility is in such a shambles. How long until OUTLOOK is back up and running?”

“A month, maybe more. Shit,” Bostick cursed and stood up. His soda-stained shirt hung from an undone belt and his hair stood up in sleep-sculpted strands. They had just finished erasing the “deaths” of twenty-three men who went missing from Fort Benning in late June under circumstances best not considered. Thirteen men had spent three months rewriting files, changing dates, moving reports, misplacing and destroying and doctoring personnel records all the way down to individual gas receipts and photographs. With the illusion complete, they hoped, each family would believe that only their loved one had simply gone AWOL.

If not, other resources would be tapped. It was a complex shuck and jive. MAJESTIC was good at it because it had done it so many times. It was their most basic play: Cover it up and deny it all. It was best not to think of how much there was to eliminate. The jobs just kept coming, each more complex than the last. Walking corpses, alien parasites and spaceships.

MAJESTIC was lucky to have a master at the wheel of their disinformation machine. That master was Charlie Bostick.

Martin Glenn handed the sheet over. In the past few years Bostick had perfected the classic technique, honing what had been a blunt tool to a wicked razor’s edge. Before his arrival, going back to 1947, the group would muscle in, throw some weight around and crush anyone who failed to toe the government line: ”UFOs did not exist, and neither did anything smacking of UFOs. It was expensive. It was a lot of work and it led to its own set of problems.

Bostick had simply pointed out the obvious: What the MAJESTIC study group dealt with, for the most part, sounded just plain ridiculous to anyone outside the group. With his new program there were no more heavy-handed black ops, outside of closing off a few persistent loose ends. Instead the group applied a little disinformation here, some misleading data there, a few small character assassinations, and voila, the mystery=the darkness that the group covered up-vanished like a media magic trick. For the most part there was no need for cordons and containment and guns. People didn’t believe in aliens and spaceships and monsters from other dimensions. Their disbelief was the lever on which human thought could be moved.

Bostick manned that lever.

Bostick knew people better than they knew themselves. He was a walking encyclopedia of fringe lore and factual weirdness, a cross-referencing media machine.

But he didn’t look like a genius. He looked like formerly happy man who has just now found out some terrible truth about life.

FINGERPRINTS CONFIRM MYSTERIOUS YOUTH IS MICHAEL LUMSDEN, the tabloid headlines shouted. NINE-YEAR-OLD RETURNS FROM THE GRAVE. FAMILY WITHHOLDS COMMENT. Bostick scanned the stories rapidly.

“Sweet Jesus,”Bostick muttered, mostly to himself. “How the fuck are we going to cover this up? This shit’s like media heroin. They will report on this one story until they die. Even I couldn’t come up with shit this sweet. . . .”

Martin Glenn could hear Justin Kroft’s answer already, and now he and Bostick said it together in unison the standard, pat answer they always were given by the steering committee.

“Just cover it up,” they both said glumly. Then they sat down and got on with it.

A look of confusion spilled over Bostick’s sallow face-then the look of something clicking into place. Hard. He jumped up and snatched a file from the edge of his desk and rapidly leafed through the pages. He settled on something, a name, circled it and then checked another in a newspaper article.

“Oh shit, they match, I think. What does that mean?” Bostick said in a strangled voice, biting his thumbnail, “I got a feeling about this one. . . .”

“What do we do now?” Glenn asked.

“We go to Philadelphia and find some yearbooks from Thomas Jefferson High School for 1989. Then we get Kroft on the horn.”

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2. Preview of Delta Green: Intelligences
3. Preview of Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly by Dennis Detwiller

"Delta Green: Intelligences" is a new short story by Dennis Detwiller in the award-winning Delta Green setting.

Dennis’ company Arc Dream Publishing is holding a fundraiser for a new Delta Green novel, Through a Glass, Darkly. As the fundraiser hits milestones towards its goal, Arc Dream will release all-new Delta Green short stories to go along with it — starting with "Intelligences."

Here is an excerpt.

Delta Green: Intelligences

Albert Syme is an odd sort who keeps to himself. Floppy and dire, he looks like a clerk, and that’s what he is; one of the thousands that haunt the lunch carts on Washington Avenue at noon. Syme’s glasses hang on the end of his nose like a man poised at the edge of a cliff. His eyes look at you precisely like those of a gecko sunning itself. They are blank and green and flat, and he stares for too long. People don’t look at him. It’s not because he’s imposing. He’s precisely the opposite, small and long-armed and bulging in the middle. It’s not because he seems dangerous. He looks somewhat simple, slick like he was dolloped in a thin grease, and empty in the face.

The reason people don’t look at him is that he’s forgettable.

At this moment, Albert Syme is as close to normal as he ever will be.

Syme works for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Precisely four people know this, and only his boss and the one other person in his office know his name. The two ladies who sit in the Navy desk opposite the ONI collation room know he’s there but don’t know who he is. He supposes the bank might know—his pay draft being supplied by the Office of the Navy, after all. He says nothing to anyone else. His barber. His landlady. To them, he is a receipt. He has no family (they gave him up in Boston) and no friends.

Such things worry Syme. Sometimes, at work, he plays a game where he draws lines, like pipes, from name to name in his mind, connecting all who might know the secret. It doesn’t really matter, he supposes, but he still worries. He imagines his name filling with water, sees the liquid moving in the dark of the pipes, drowning the names of those connected to him. He pictures the people in their tubes, drowning as the water rushes in, in the dark.

He smiles when he thinks these things. His secret, his job, is the most important thing in his life.

The job is his life, though he couldn’t tell you why.

Now, July 19, 1928, he eats a hot dog in the summer sun, grasping it in one ink-stained hand while holding his hat down to keep it from catching the breeze and tumbling up the walk. He is surrounded by hundreds of people who fail to see him, lost in their own lunches, conversations, lives. He eats with the conviction and blankness of an animal. He does this every day when the weather is fine.

When he finishes, he crumples up the hot dog’s wax paper wrapper and drops it to the cement. He glances at the ink on his hand and heads back up the steps of the huge, stone building, crossing from the light of the sun into the shadow of the portico. As he crosses from outside to in, the wind catches his hat but he snatches it from the air before it can get away.

He goes inside and continues the last day of his daily routine.

Δ

If Syme had left ten minutes later, he would have seen the officers arrive. Three men in Navy dress, one with a handcuffed valise on his arm. In this building that is not unusual, but this man was a rear admiral. His name tag read WELLES. Syme would have recognized him from the photo on the wall next to the hot pot. He stares at it every day. The two men with the rear admiral were built in the exact way Syme is not. They were human walls with legs, wearing truncheons and pistols on their hips. They did not smile or speak.

These men entered the ONI collation room and the rear admiral spoke with Syme’s supervisor, Templeton Mears, a man who always looks as if he had just survived some near disaster. Mears listened to the description of the job the rear admiral had in mind, and before he could finish Mears swung a hand towards Syme’s desk. Mears barely contained the black terror he felt speaking to the Director of Naval Intelligence. As they spoke, it looked as if Mears’ eyes would continue to grow until they engulfed his whole face.

When the rear admiral was done, the valise was opened and papers were removed, as well as two manilla envelopes which stank of photographic chemicals. They were placed squarely in the center of Syme’s desk. Mears signed a paper for them, and the men left. Immediately Mears fell into his wood chair, which squeaked under his weight. He covered his eyes with his hands.

The room fell back into the drone of the electric clock ticking time.

If he had been there, Syme would have seen all of this. Instead, he was outside, eating his hot dog.

Δ

Syme does not like his boss. Mr. Mears is a slack man. He fails to do what is required by the job. He slinks in and out at odd hours. He piles work on Syme’s desk. He reads funny books and sports annuals and flips through the encyclopedias which line the wood-grained walls, leaving Syme and the other man in the office, Norman, to finish the collation. Norman is not efficient, but cares about his work. Syme does not hate Norman. Instead, he feels about Norman the way he feels about the people who ride the #13 bus with him on the way to work. They are there the reason he is there, and as long as they don’t bother him, he will not bother them.

What they do in the room, besides being secret, is boring. They pull Navy files, type and collate copies, staple photographs, cross-check ID numbers and collect them for closed envelope reports. They hand-duplicate files, sometimes many times over. These reports are numbered and are picked up once a week by an armed Navy officer. Where they go from there, no one in the room has any idea. For Norman it is a source of endless speculation. For Mears it is a unconsidered question. For Syme it is an indication that what they do here, in the ONI Collation Office, room 3118, is important.

Syme enters and finds Mears’ desk empty. Norman sits at his smaller, steel desk, hunched over it, his jacket off, sweat on his thick brow and in his thinning brown hair. Norman leans over a sheet of graphing paper and draws a careful line on it with a mechanical pencil. He does this with his tongue pinched between his yellow teeth. Norman often has to hand-draw maps. It is something Syme does not have an eye for.

“What is this document?” Syme asks the room, his back to Norman’s back.

Norman’s pencil stops on the sheet and he turns. His face is round and red and Irish. His mouth hangs open. His empty blue eyes stare at Syme’s back without any recognition of the fact that Syme was speaking to him.

Syme hefts the folders and holds them up without turning around.

“Some big wheel brought that down from the Chief of Naval Operations. I wasn’t here. Just Mears. Mears told me.”

“Where is Mears?”

Norman laughs, repeats the question in a whisper as if it were a joke, and goes back to work.

Syme removes his jacket, catching a whiff of his body odor in the process, folds the coat and drops it over the edge of his chair. He sits, pulls in his chair, carefully arranges his tools on the table—his typewriter, his India ink, his fountain pen, his mechanical pencil, stapler, eraser, ink eraser, paperclips and onionskins.

When this is done, he opens the photographic envelopes first. This has become a habit for him. He likes to guess what the report might be by looking at the photos. Photographs of wreckage usually mean foreign technology intelligence; bodies usually mean accidents; grainy photos are often spy shots of foreign fleets; photos of people usually mean suspected spies. There will be the original and for each original a copy.

Today when he looks at the first image, he has no idea what the report might contain.

The photograph is of an eye in extreme close-up. It is huge, bulbous and black, hanging on the skin of some creature, skin which looks like it is flaking off in diamond-shaped chunks. A human hand is barely visible in the upper right corner, out of focus, holding a wooden ruler with large hash-marks. The ruler indicates the eye is three and a quarter inches across. Even though the whole creature is not visible, Syme can see it is dead. He is not precisely sure why he knows this.

Something pulled from the ocean by some Navy destroyer?

Syme blinks, staring at the photo, and adjusts his glasses as if that might somehow help.

Finally, in an attempt to jumpstart his work, he unshuffles the stack of photos and papers in a fan on his desk, like a deck of cards.

He sits still for a long time.

Then he reads.

– Dennis Detwiller, © 2011

Arc Dream Publishing will release the full text of "Delta Green: Intelligences" when the Through a Glass, Darkly fundraiser hits $15,000. You can sign up below.

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The first part of the highly anticipated Cthulhu Apocalypse series.

The Investigators are rendered unconscious by a train crash. When they wake they discover the world has died. White flowers cover the ground and they see, beneath the delicate petals, the faces of the dead. No other human is in sight, everyone is gone.

The struggle to survive the apocalypse takes the Investigators through Britain, across the sea to America and beyond the veils of reality.

The Dead White World contains the first three scenarios for Cthulhu Apocalypse by Graham Walmsley, author of The Purist Adventures.

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive preview of this new Trail of Cthulhu product from Pelgrane Press.

Cthulhu Apocalypse: The Dead White World

For the Investigators, the end of the world begins in Dover. After a train crash, they awake to discover that the world has died, with human corpses littering the roads.

Exploring further, they find a Russian tanker, which has leaked its cargo of seeds. These seeds are a biological weapon. When the Investigators find the tanker, creatures arise from the sea, and the Investigators must flee.

This scenario is constructed around two big events:

• Waking up to find everyone is dead.
• Creatures rising from the sea and destroying Dover.

Compared to other scenarios, there is little investigation. The scenario is about witnessing the apocalypse, rather than investigating it. So encourage the players to linger, particularly during the initial scenes.

The Hook

Everyone is dead.

The Question

What caused the apocalypse?

The Horrible Truth

In Dover Harbour, a Russian tanker contains seeds for the British government. These seeds are weapons, created by a Russian agronomist. Once released, they infect water supplies and breed with astonishing rapidity.

This morning, an undersea earthquake produced a great wave, which dashed the trailer against the harbour wall. The seeds leaked out and began to multiply.

At first, the seeds were invisible in the water. People who drank it later died, as the seeds grew inside them. The only survivors are those who have not touched the polluted water.

The earthquake also caused a train to derail. It crashed, killing almost all the passengers. Hours later, a few survivors wake, to see how the world has ended. These are the Investigators.

The Investigators have not been infected with the seeds. Having been unconscious for hours, they have not drunk the infected water. If they drank anything before that, it was tea on the train, and fortunately the tea urns were sealed.

Hours later, the water is white, packed with the seeds. Meanwhile, the earthquakes continue and the sea-creatures prepare to emerge.

The Spine

When the Investigators wake after a train crash, they find everyone dead and everything covered with white flowers.

They reach the Crown Hotel, where they find their Sources of Stability dead. There, a Russian sailor attempts to kill the Investigators. From the sailor, they find that the flowers came from a ship in Dover Harbour.

As they approach the ship, there are earthquakes. Inside, the Investigators find the flowers were ordered, as a weapon, by the British government. Finally, great creatures emerge from the sea, and the Investigators flee.

Prologue: The Plant

To begin the scenario, choose one Investigator: a botanist or biologist is ideal, but any Investigator will do. Reveal the following information slowly, step-by-step, as they wake and look around.

When that Investigator wakes, they see a plant growing before their eyes. It is delicate, like a snowdrop. Yet, since it is early winter, it cannot be a snowdrop. Certainly, it is not a common plant.

If the Investigator touches the plant, it scatters white seeds. The wind catches the seeds, blowing them far away.

Now, the Investigator feels grass pressing against their face. They are, they realise, lying in a field. Looking around, they see similar plants scattered everywhere.

Next, as their eyes focus, they see a wrecked train. Slowly, they remember. They were on a train to Dover to attend a wedding. It must have crashed.

The Crashed Train

The train lies on its side. As the other Investigators wake, the first thing they notice is the cold: they have lain motionless for hours in the wintry air. The shadows are lengthening, the sky is cloudy. Within an hour, the sun will fall below the horizon.

Ask the Investigators where they wake up at the crash site. Some have been thrown clear of the wreck; some are wedged between corpses. If the Investigators are strangers to each other, let them meet now, as they rescue each other, attend to wounds and search for survivors.

But there are no survivors. Bar the Investigators, everyone is dead. Indeed, everything is eerily still: there is no noise, save for the piercing cry of an occasional seagull.

At the top of an embankment is the railway. The tracks curve, here, and it appears the train shot straight off the tracks. The road to Dover runs alongside the railway. Indeed, the town is distantly visible, about three miles away.

There is a signal box, a short walk down the tracks. Inside, the Investigators find the signalman’s corpse. It is curled in a corner, with agony on the face and a white froth around the lips. If the Investigators try the telephone, there is no reply. Indeed, on closer examination, there is no electric power.

The road, also, is strangely still. About half a mile towards Dover is a car, parked at the side of the road. As the Investigators approach, they notice a man and a woman inside. Both are dead. The man has shot the woman, then himself, with a revolver clutched in his hand. They are holding hands and, judging from the rings, are a married couple. Around their lips, again, is the white froth.

As the Investigators head further towards Dover, they find more cars, similarly parked. It seems that people tried to flee Dover, then realised they were dying. One family sits on the grass verge, huddled together. Two young women, together in a car, killed themselves by drinking bleach from a tea flask. All have the white froth around their lips.

If the Investigators prefer to drive to Dover, they can take any of these cars. They will need to move the bodies first.

As they travel, the Investigators realise the plants are everywhere. Clumps are scattered along the grassy banks at the side of the road. When the wind gusts, or the Investigators pass in a car, the seeds float gently away, like a wisp of smoke. The surrounding fields, too, are sprinkled with patches of white. It is eerily beautiful.

Equally disturbing is the stillness. There is no sound of engines. There are no lights in Dover. Nothing moves, apart from the clouds overhead, as the Investigators cross a bridge and head down the road.

Give the Investigators two Sense Trouble rolls, difficulty 5 (but see the sidebar, Sensing Trouble). The first roll is for the clouds. They’re not really clouds. Instead, to anyone who makes the roll, they resemble a curious white smoke. They are, the Investigators realise, clouds of seeds.

The second roll is for the bridge, which crosses a stream. Anyone who makes the roll notices a flash of white in the corner of their eye. When they look down, the river is white, like milk. Looking closer, it is filled with seeds. The river banks bloom thickly and beautifully with the white plants.

As the Investigators approach Dover, they see many, many corpses. Most are sitting by the side of the road. Some have committed suicide, some have died in agony. The Investigators see dozens of corpses, but thousands, even millions, must be dead.

* * * * *

Cthulhu Apocalypse: The Dead White World is available now at RPGNow.com.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from Pelgrane Press.

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FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with the introduction from Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them. This collection of essays was edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Deborah Stanish, and was recently published through Mad Norwegian Press.

Introduction

Lynne’s Story:

You may know me as a Chick Who Digs Time Lords, but I’m also an avowed Whedonista. Although Whedon fandom is not my primary active fandom (that belongs to the Doctor), the Whedonverse has been a part of my life for just about as long.

I mentioned in Chicks Dig Time Lords that watching Doctor Who got me through much of my pregnancy; Buffy the Vampire Slayer got me through oh, I dunno, my whole adult life. As an ex-cheerleader who grew up to be a rare books librarian (no, really), it seemed, well, appropriate, even if the collections I’m responsible for aren’t located on a Hellmouth, and I don’t rock tweed quite as well as Giles. I landed my current job as a pop culture librarian/archivist through my knowledge of librarianship and Buffy in equal measure. Now if I can just get our subscription to the “Demons, Demons, Demons” database up and running…

For me it’s less about the Big Bad, and more about the heart. As I struggled with my life’s challenges, like my mother’s death, and the hospitalizations of my daughter with special needs, I could hold on to Big Damn Heroes, folks who took on Alliances or demon armies with quips, determination, and a posse of their friends. And looked good doing it. There are worse role models. Joss, we love your work so much that we made you this book. I hope you like it.

Deb’s Story:

On a September morning in 2003 I nervously checked my hair in the rearview mirror, smoothed down my Gap sleeveless turtleneck, locked my car and walked into a hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Meeting an illicit lover would have made me less nervous but the truth is I was a suburban mom in my mid-30’s meeting “Internet people” for the very first time.

I was going to my first fan convention.

While working on this book I discovered two things: Everyone has a story to tell on how they found “their” Whedon show and, once discovered, that show helped them form a community, provided inspiration or tossed them a lifeline when they needed it most.

Much like women who feel compelled to share their birth stories, Whedonistas feel compelled to share this wonderful and powerful thing that changed their lives.

I know it changed mine.

Through Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer I discovered online fandom. I learned Internet etiquette, found a community of smart, fierce women who argued with abandon, and created with joy.

The thing with the Whedonverse, it’s about connections. Both on the screen and off. I’d made my online connection, and when I walked into that hotel in 2003 I made a real life connection. On the surface we had little in common, but a shared passion united us.

I became a more knowledgeable and compassionate person. Issues of tolerance, racism and homophobia weren’t just concepts, they were real and affecting my friends. My complacent, soccer-mom life was shaken and I learned to question, to accept, and to embrace.

In return for flipping my life upside down, the Whedonverse has been very generous. I traveled, met more fantastic “Internet people” and learned that while actors are nifty, writers are my heroes. I volunteered at cons, co-chaired a con and learned that sitting at a dais and talking to a roomful of people about the thing you love is the most terrifying, exhilarating experience in the world. (Other than sitting next to Catherynne M. Valente in a New York radio station at 5 a.m. and attempting to be witty and insightful about fandom.)

The great thing about connections is that, with a little nurturing, they continue to grow. Whedonverse fans led me, kicking and screaming, to Doctor Who, which led to publishing opportunities, meeting yet more amazing “Internet people,” and drinking mojitos on New York’s Lower East Side after my first book-signing experience.

So thank you, Joss Whedon, for creating the universe, to our contributors who shared their stories and to everyone who dared to make a connection to this wonderful and powerful thing called the Whedonverse.

The Whedonistas Story:

So what is a “Whedonista”, anyway?

Beats us. We burned through a lot of titles when struggling to find one that accurately described this unique collection of essays by women writers, artists and fans, but nothing seemed quite right. Just like the worlds of Joss Whedon, this volume contains multitudes. Much like Joss Whedon the man, it’s nearly impossible to put in a neat box. Finally, Lynne came up with the word in the shower one day, and we knew we had a perfect fit.

We’re not the first people to use the term, but we liked that the word has a distinctly feminine feel, perfect since this book turns the female gaze on Whedon’s work. He built a career on creating strong female characters and now we’re flipping the table and looking at the creator’s works through our own lenses.

It’s not only strong female characters that have built Whedon’s reputation, it’s also his delight in turning tropes on their head. Within the first two minutes of his breakout show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he made us re-examine our perceptions of what goes bump in the night. In Buffy, the innocent school girl was the monster we fear, the flighty cheerleader was the savior of the world, and a delicious bad boy hid just below the surface of the prim and proper male librarian. The trend followed in Whedon’s later offerings. From Kaylee to Zoe, Cordelia to Echo, Willow to Fred, we have strong women making their way through extraordinary circumstances with style, wit, and heart. They didn’t wait around for rescue. They strapped on a stake or sword; used a magic spell, science lab or database; and kicked some evil ass.

We’re all for heroines who kick ass and take names. We’re also pretty fond of female engineers who can appreciate beauty in all its forms, deadly assassin teens, lady vampires who are off their rocker and computer nerds turned witches. And let’s not forget the menfolk – broody vampires with souls and badass vampires without them, The Evil League of Evil (helloo, application form!), space captains with tight pants and large… hearts, and so many other examples of characters that we would never see anywhere other than in the Whedonverse’s… tight embrace.

Is it any wonder that female viewers fell in love with these worlds?

We embraced the characters, the shows and their creator. More than simply thinking this was cool television, we wanted to talk about it. Online forums, fansites, conventions and academic conferences proliferated. These shows were important to us, and we wanted to turn them around and around, to examine their details and nuances, to analyze and revel in words and works that have affected us in ways that we’re still discovering. What makes this volume special is that it brings us back to the proverbial water cooler.

That’s partly what Whedonistas is all about.

Quite simply, it’s personal. Each of us has had our lives personally affected by our enthusiasm for these shows. And we aren’t alone. That deep personal connection with the shows, their fandoms and each other is what makes us Whedonistas.

The essayists in this book – a unique combination of professional and amateur writers – have come together to talk about how Whedon’s shows, as well as the fandoms that they inspired, have changed lives for the better. We bring you stories that will break your heart, lift your spirits and make you think about how “just a television show” (or five) can have a huge impact on generations of viewers, merely by making “strong female characters” the default rather than the exception.

To sum it up, Whedonistas is an eclectic and exciting collection of essays that touch on nearly all aspects of the shows, the fandoms and the people to whom they made a difference.

Industry insiders have kindly given us insight into the production of the Whedonverse. SF/F authors take on some of their favorite tropes, series, stories and characters, and tie them to their lives and their work. (Hint:
Spike is rather popular.)

Other essayists outline the process and impact of shifting the Whedonverse from television to comics, the transition from fanfiction to professional publication, and what happens when you cheat on your muse with Spike (did we mention popular?). Our writers take on feminism in the Whedonverse, show us how Whedonista families and communities are made, discuss fandom across the pond in the UK and help us to understand Buffy’s calling. They also look at coming to a fandom late, and how they brought new fans into the fold.

See? Multitudes.

So join us. No matter how you choose to define “Whedonistas,” you’re on our crew.

About Whedonistas: In Whedonistas, a host of award-winning female writers and fans come together to celebrate the works of Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog). By discussing the impact of Whedon’s work, their involvement with his shows fandoms and why they adore the worlds he’s created, these essayists aim to misbehave in Whedon’s rich, fantastical worlds. Essay topics include Sharon Shinn (Samaria series) and Emma Bull (Territory) elaborating on the perfection of Firefly, Jeanne Stein (the Anna Strong Chronicles) revealing Buffy’s influence on Anna Strong, and Nancy Holder (October Rain, The Watcher’s Guide) relating on-the-set tales of Spike menacing her baby daughter while Riley made her hot chocolate. Other contributors include Seanan McGuire (October Daye series), Elizabeth Bear (Chill), Catherynne M. Valente (Palimpsest), Maria Lima (Blood Lines), Jackie Kessler (Black and White), Mariah Huehner (IDW Comics), Sarah Monette (Corambis), and Lyda Morehouse (AngeLINK series). Also featured are exclusive interviews with television writer / producer Jane Espenson and actress Juliet Landau.

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The year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R’lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu. Together with pistol-packin’ junkie William S. Burroughs, Jack and Neal make their way across the continent to face down the murderous Lovecraftian cult that has spread its darkness to the heart of the American Dream. But is Neal along for the ride to help save the world, or does he want to destroy it just so that he’ll have an ending for his book?

Flames Rising is pleased to present you with the first chapter from Move Under Ground, a Lovecraft-inspired novel by author Nick Mamatas. Set in the 1960s, Move Under Ground is Mamatas’s debut novel about a character named Jack Kerouac who receives strange, rambling letters from Neal Cassaday. Will Jack successfully rescue Neal? Will they escape the Cult of Utter Normalcy? Or will they face Cthulhu himself? Dubbed an “ambitious” novel, read Chapter One and enjoy a fresh voice inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.

Chapter One

I was in Big Sur hiding from my public when I finally heard from Neal again. He had had problems of his own after the book came out and it started being carried around like a rosary by every scruffy party boy looking for a little cross-country hitchhiking adventure. They’d followed him around like they’d followed me, but Neal drank too deeply of the well at first, making girls left and right as usual, taking a few too many shots to the face, and eating out on the story of our travels maybe one too many times. Those boozy late-night dinners with crazy soulless characters whose jaws clacked like mandibles when they laughed are what got to him in the end, I’m sure. They were hungry for something. Not just the college boys and beautiful young things, but those haggard-looking veterans of Babylon who started shadowing Neal and me on every street corner and at every dawn-draped last call in roadside bars; they all wanted more than a taste of Neal’s divine spark, they wanted to extinguish it in their gullets. Neal was the perfect guy for them as he always walked on the edge, ever since the first shiv was held to his throat at reform school when he was a seven-year-old babe with a fat face and shiny teary cheeks. He wanted to eat up the whole world himself like they did, I knew from my adventures on the road with him, but I didn’t learn what was eating him ’til I got that letter that drove me to move under ground.

The letters had become more infrequent while I was out on Big Sur living in Larry’s little cabin, due to me at first, I thought. I was working on my spontaneous writing, which sounds a bit contradictory but discoveries need to be plumbed, not just noted, and I was turning out roll after roll of pages about the stark black cliffs and how it felt that the world wasn’t just shifting under my feet but how I was sure one day I’d end up standing still while the big blue marble just rolled out from under me to leave me hanging over the inky maw of the universe. I didn’t take breaks except to pick my way into town every week or ten days to get some supplies: potatoes and beans, some cooking oil, whiskey, chaw, more rolls of paper which came in special just for me thanks to Larry, and stamps and my mail. Letters, only three were from Neal, most from mother and my aunt and one or two from my agent with checks so big I couldn’t even cash them but instead had to sell them for a dime on the dollar to the one-eyed shopkeeper at the general store that held my mail for me. By that time I could hardly stand to hear anyone’s voice so I never spent more than a few hours in town, just enough to do my errands, get my socks washed by the old unsmiling Chinaman and wolf down some cherry pie with ice cream. Even the great belly laughs of the old-timers who had shuffled up from Los Angeles when the strawberry crops had turned black on the vine grated on me when I heard them now, but those curlicue swirls on Memere’s letters were soothing and stainless like the sky. I’d read them as I’d hike back up to the cabin, smoking a great Cuban just to have some light to read by if I didn’t get home before dark.

Neal’s letters were something else altogether, and he was still something else, too, as the kids say. The first letter was typical Neal, full of big plans to play connect-the-dots between girls and writers. “Oh dearest Jack,” he wrote to me, “once you’re all settled and have ironed up after your latest crack-up I’ll come down from San Fran in Carolyn’s father’s great old battleship of a car, then drive right back up the coast in reverse through Oregon where the trees hold up the vault of the sky. Then we can tour Vancouver; it’s a wet warm pocket of life up in those frozen wastes and I know Carolyn has a friend named Suzette you might like as she is very deep into Spengler . . . ” and he’d spin more and more of his golden grift. I’d read his old letters over and over ’til the ink ran off the wrinkled page but only once got around to writing him back. It was too hard to think, being lost in the words of his letters, but they were the only things that kept the horrible roar of the ocean against the cliffs from overwhelming me. No matter what, I couldn’t find the Buddha in the rhythmic crashing of the waves anymore, so instead I drank myself into concrete unconsciousness.

In Neal’s second letter, the empty spaces between existence became a bit more clear. He could feel it too, how the world was pulling itself apart somehow, and how some dark dream had begun to ooze into the American cracks. He didn’t need to say it; Neal was always best understood between the lines. “Far be it from me to suggest that two old Catholic boys take off their clothes, scramble down the bluffs and toss themselves into the foam just to stain the waves red for a precious heartbeat of a moment all to gain the attention of some Three-Lobed Burning Eye, but even when I’m nestled between Billie’s legs taking in her fecund smell, I just feel that we ought to . . . ” he wrote, but I knew he meant something else. He was trying to stitch something together; he had some weird forlorn hope that he could save the world from what we both could feel was lurking in the Outer Deep. Usually, I thought of smiling old Neal catting between wife and girlfriend, grinning and pretending to write, misunderstanding Nietzsche in the most brilliant of ways, but now I could only conceive of him as some blind fly picking his way along highway webbing. I didn’t write him a letter back after that. Not at first.

I wrote at him though, on my old Clark Nova, the one Bill had sent me from Tangiers along with a cryptic note of his own about the little adding machine spring his family fortune was based on. “It only has one end(ing)” he wrote in his junky scrawl and drew me a swirl that I couldn’t look at for long without blacking out. So I wrote to Neal, and to Bill too, but through my novel, not ever in letter form. I wrote ’til the letters on the keys were stamped in my pink blood, long scrolls of philosophy and gin-stewed sex, and I’d take the rolls out to the bush, kick my way to the rocky cliff and roll my scroll down to the shore like a challenge to that Dark Dreamer waiting for us all out in the Pacific. He didn’t blink. I’d roll the paper back up, take it home and add it back to the pile of scrolls along one of the walls of the cabin. The air smelled sour for Big Sur. I imagined the old gang could read the display even in the spiritual night and fog–which me and Neal and Bill and maybe even Larry and Allen had all been swimming through (but just a touch on those two, Larry being too much the businessman and Allen too degraded and attached to sodomy to really hear The Call).

When I ran out of paper, which was often enough because I could hardly get it into town to get more and because Larry was just nonplused at what seemed to be my output and could hardly keep up with my needs, I meditated and spoke the mantra of Kilaya ’til my throat cracked like August bark. It was Kilaya: the three-headed demon with bat wings who was converted to the protection of the dharma by the compassion of a wise old lama on a hilltop not too different from the one I was on, who came to me as a pale redhead with great loose curls of hair like a forest fire. She had an excellent belly laugh for a little thing (her ribs were like a pile of sticks) and she whispered in my ear, “College boy. College boy, you look so kind and decent,” and made little whirls in my own dark hair with a finger. I worshipped her for two weeks and fell asleep to her whimpering up against my chest. We didn’t even need to build a fire or light one of the old blubber lamps Larry had lying around in the dust of his cabin; her skin glowed like holy lightning. I made her three times a night and forgot all about the winedark waves hammering against the shattered cliff face for a few days at least.

She was a humble girl, like deities should be, and humored me by frying up the salt pork and licking thick sour mash off the side of my bottle hours after I’d spilled some, and she even pretended that I was ready to go back to New York with the three hundred dollars I was saving in the crack between logs in the wall against which I stacked all my scrolls for insulation against the wind. “You could buy a car,” she’d say happily, a kicky little roadster and take the direct route back to Neal, who was probably just there waiting for me in Washington Square Park. I called her Marie. Marie smelled of sage and crushed grapes and told me that I wasn’t long for the world, but not because I’d be going anywhere. I’d have to go somewhere in order to save the world, she said, then she’d pull me back down onto our little mattress and kiss me so hard it was like swallowing an ocean of her. It was a languid week of attachment. I couldn’t so much as leave sight of the cabin for fear that Marie would be gone when I returned, even as she warned me again and again that I’d soon be on the road. It was a test of my strength and I was failing miserably ’til I ran out of liquor and finally had to roll back into town to get supplies.

Neal’s third letter was waiting for me. It was a package of a roll of paper like Larry sent me, but this one was covered on both sides with writing, some typewritten, much of it scrawled in lead, pen or blood. Much of it was smeared but I didn’t wait to read it. I hiked back up the little dirt path to the cabin on the bluff with the scroll in my hands, the paper tossed over my shoulder and unwinding in the dust I kicked up behind me. It was some brilliant stuff, a melding of past and present and dark future. Bill doing his old William Tell routine in a fit of Mexican madness. Me and him in Denver, trying to throw a party. Some haiku. My haiku. The scroll was my writing, at least forty percent of it, transmitted across the aether, painstakingly copied in blood and cut-up between paragraphs and sentences, buried under Neal’s own blabbering about Al-Azif and the mad blind tentacle-bearded spawn of the Dreamer of the Deep who were waiting for their old god, nearly dead, to rise again. This could only mean one thing. I had to get to San Francisco. Neal probably wouldn’t even be there, but maybe Larry or some benny-addled homosexual would have seen him on the streets, shivering with DTs like a dowsing rod close to a salty marsh and headed somewhere where I could find him.

I tore up to the cabin and threw Neal’s roll into the fire where it went up in a belch of black slime and smoke. Marie was there sitting in a full lotus, back arced and humble little breasts presented for me, but I couldn’t even bring myself to turn to her. If I did, I’d succumb to attachment. I went to my own wall of scrolls and started taking it apart to get the cash I’d hidden in the cracks of the cabin wall, but found only green and brown shreds of the stuff, wet pulp and rat droppings. I swallowed the curse because bodhisattva was watching and managed to calmly worm a few tired bills, the ones just nibbled a bit, out of the wall. Seventeen dollars. I’d gone further on less, and I grabbed a random scroll for New York to slice into domesticated pages; they could wire the money to Larry for me while I hunted for Neal. Marie transformed into a honeybee, and buzzed a sutra into my ear as I packed my little rucksack. We left together out the door, she hovering about my collar, whispering wisdom and secret knowledge directly to my brain. I didn’t even lock up the cabin behind me. The bee once named Marie, also the bodhisattva Kilaya, zig-zagged off in every direction at once.

The day was hot and I was slick with sweat even before I got to the highway. Blisters formed and burst on my soles, then the wounds swirled with my salty perspiration. It was only a mile and a half to the road, but I had been lazy with fat sex and ambrosia for nearly ten days, and played a haggard beatnik bank clerk chained to my typewriter for the month prior, so it was a harder stroll than I remembered. The woods were against me too. A canopy of leaves collapsed into a ditch here, a root grabbed my ankle and set me flying like a jiujitsu move from a Navy buddy there. I came across a squirrel drowned in a stagnant puddle, and it looked at me like only a wetsack rodent carcass could. Don’t screw this one up its black pebble eye said to me, and when you can stare a dead squirrel in the eye and hear it demand a promise from you while even the mosquitoes hover in the air and wait for your answer, you know you got some serious headaches ahead.

The highway was white and near-deserted. Big Sur had become a bit of what some tin-eared newspaperman would call a Mecca for kids looking for real live Beats and the orgies and nitrous parties that were always supposed to swirl up from the rot in our wake, but that didn’t last long. Once the newspapermen got wind of it and sectioned our little land off to sell to the public, the tourists came. And after the tourists, the families came in their huge station wagons stuffed with kids screaming for ice cream and white-tile bathrooms and they’d never stop for you, not for one of those crazy beatniks they’d come to see.

Maybe once in a long while you could catch a ride from a lone man. They were the same guys who had souped up their wagons and took to the road at eighty miles an hour, bursting from the wavy horizon just to see how far they could go without even tapping their brakes. Five years later though, their paperbacks were in some attic trunk and old poems ashes and they’d turned to breeding for the goddamn race. No longer could I catch a ride from these mindslave men, though I occasionally caught their eyes as they slowed, tempted as they were to pull over, kick the wife out and load me in for a wild ride up to The City. They were the guys in the short-sleeved button-up shirts, the men with sunglasses pushed up to the tops of their noses, with their arms leaning on the window well of their car doors just to get a little breeze, just so that they could stare into the sun for a moment longer and forget about the mortgage and the PTA and their goddamn uncle-in-law the John Bircher who wanted to set them up fine with a job selling aluminum siding to their own fellow chained oarsmen. But they drove past and turned to their little wives and said “Ah, there’s one,” and left me to curse on the asphalt.

And it being a hot July afternoon, none of the truckers were ready to stop for me when they could just pull over three miles uproad and guzzle down a gallon of ice water or chilled Cokes along with a pork chop and half a beer, so I put the late-setting sun on my left and started hoofing north on the bloody balls of my feet, thumb out. I walked on, waving my thumb at the empty ghost of a road, occasionally swigging some water from my canteen. It was rough in my bloody boots; now my ankles were chafed as well. I balanced the rucksack on my head to keep the sun off of it, but that didn’t help, and the straps had already dug into my shoulders, so I took to swinging it, tossing it twenty yards in front of me, and then leisurely strolling over just to pick the sack up. No wonder I wasn’t getting any nibbles from the few folks who did drive by.

It got dark fast; there was hardly any dusk at all. And behind me, I heard the roar of a convoy, but they weren’t old trucks coming my way. Instead, it was wagons, sedans, curvy Studebakers, and even a few old crank cars with rumble seats and shivering fabric roofs. Town cars driving five abreast in tight formation across only two lanes of highway, eating up the shoulders, headlights suddenly blazing a terrible, beautiful amber. I cut into the wood and watched them zoom past from a little ditch I happened to fall into. Above the narrow, mud-stained alley I was in, the collective purr of the motorcars choked themselves silent. There were hundreds of cars, it seemed, all stinking of fumes thick enough to cover the scent of the wet leaves I picked out of my teeth and ears. I hustled backwards, lost my rucksack, found it again and fell hard, banging my kneecap like a cymbal. I heard a dozen doors slam behind me, and limped a bit, rucksack in my arm football-style, to put some space and trees between me and whoever that horrible Them was looking for me. The rim of the highway was a ribbon of gleaming off-the-lot paintjobs, even on the oldest cars. Men and a few women, all in their Sunday best including too-hot-for-summertime stoles and those insipid little flowered hats, tromped down into the brush after me, all silent but for crackling branches. Not a “Ho there,” or a “Do ya see ‘im, Mildred? Do you see the man they say runs the orgies?” and not even an “Ow, I fell into a ditch.” Just eerie inexorable marching. I feinted right then veered left, poked under a shield of roots from a tree blown half out of the ground, then cut right again.

And they tumbled after me, a little army of Boris Karloffs and Elsa Lanchesters run through the projector at double speed, herky-jerky, often falling and sliding down a streak of mud, or just wildly but silently smacking branches out of the way on their way down. One man, all white shirt belly and lippy grin was right on top of me, and with a wild but damn quiet leap jumped off the rock he was perched on and sailed over my head. He landed hard enough that my ankles felt it, but without a grunt or so much as a look back at me, he smashed his way deeper into the forest, heading down to the bluffs.

I decided on a little experiment. I stood still, but kept the straps of my little rucksack wrapped around my fist and wrist in case I needed a weapon, and let them come at me. A woman was first–she was huffing like a smoker but was calm-eyed even as she ran up to my chest and smacked into me. She slid off me sweatily with just a half step and kept right on running. She didn’t even raise a hand to adjust her little hat, so it fell off and I reached down to snatch it up just to have another little twig of a girl plant a dainty foot on my kidneys and then hop off of me. I grunted hard, but nobody heard or noticed. Then I stood up, wound up my arm and slammed the next fellow I saw right in the side of the face with my sack. I heard the tinny-tin ting of my canteen bounce off his chinny chin chin but even this joe didn’t turn to face me. He just kept on, his split lip making his smile a lopsided leer, like one of Neal’s after a three-day nod. I shouldered my sack, cracked my toes (the poor little piggies were swimming in bloody sweat now), and started easing my way down into the dark of the woods beyond the headlights and ran straight into Dreamland.

It was still woods at first, but woods of a different sort. Cacti were everywhere, scratching me with steel syringes as I passed; then snaking ivy slid over my poor tired boots. I yelped loud and danced away from them, and the rose-red buds opened and hissed at me. The well-dressed gentry nearest my little Mr. Bojangles routine had taken to galloping along on their haunches and knuckles, but a few further away from me were still holding their heads high, like it was time to tell a hotel bellboy what for. They glowed like swamp gas and I could see their faces clearly after I blinked away my sweaty tears. They were hungry. Every one of the souls around me had that hungry fear painted cross their faces. The fear of a whore who just lost a tooth and a little bit more of her looks to a pimp slap. Hungry like little Charles Ma filling his opium pipe while sitting crossbones-style up on a palette on the Oakland piers. Not hungry for anything, the way Neal was when I’d met him, when we spoke about writing or when I watched him amble off towards some college girl with knitted stockings and a tucked-up copy of The Militant under the crook of her arm, but hungry for nothing. Nothingness. Not even the peaceful touch of Buddha’s palm, or the deepest sleep I had on Marie’s shoulder just a night ago, but a great big horrible nothing, the nothing that can’t stand to be defined by the some things floating around on in it. Then the forest around me, queer as it was already, pulsed and twisted into something else entirely.

The tree in front of me was jelly. I guess jelly, or ectoplasm or liquid aether, a huge pillar of it I’d say, if pillars were made up of slabs of living lard. It wobbled and touched my mind, poking through history and poetry to scoop out the thought-form of lost Terry, the little Mexican girl I made for a few weeks. We had lived in a tent and waited around for her brothers to get me a job collecting manure and selling it to the local cotton farmers, but then I got the itch and headed out on the road again. And now she was there before me. Nipples like brown plums, quiet eyes and little cesarean scars running up her tender belly. For a wrong moment I followed my desire, and her face exploded into a huge gaping Venus flytrap mouth with tentacled teeth. Sweet Jesus, if my boot heel didn’t pick that very serendipitous second to split and land me on my derrière, I’d have been meat that night and fertilizer today. But I fell under the snapping and squiggling mouth and kicked hard at Terry’s knee. Top-heavy from the snapping head, now atop a whipping stalk of a neck, she fell backwards, but was replaced. A huge wall of Neal’s faces, some smiling, some winking, others distracted and even bored rolled up to me. I skittered backwards on my palms, but sweet earth betrayed me, turning warm and viscous then collapsing into a pit. The thought-forms were shambling towards me now, a mass of Neals and Memeres and my poor old brother like he would have looked had he been grown. The coach from damn Columbia and Allen too and stupid Chad and Terry’s brother Chavo, and goddamn even Marie with preying mantis limbs as long as she, they were all there surrounding me, with snake bodies or flat snake faces simply plopped atop cockroach legs.

Shapeshifters. The formless given form by thought or evil deed. Shoggoth. I knew the word now, somehow, but not from some half-remembered bongo drum poem or off the back of a jar of Ovaltine. Marie-The-Bee had told me on the way out the door, bless her. Stilt-Marie sliced a wandering churchlady in half with a swipe of scythe-arm, and chittered at me, but I couldn’t hear her over the splattered meat smacking into what I might as well call the ground. And then I remembered the buzz in my ear from when I left the cabin and the sweet perfume of green grape and sage.

The Master had gathered the students into the courtyard one day and held aloft a butcher’s knife, a simple and base act that alone would require a week of ritual cleansing. Worse, then, he drew his other hand from behind his back and held up a cat by the scruff of its neck.

“Stop me,” Master said, “from killing this cat. Stop me from performing this base act of barbarism.”

The timid semi-circle of saffron-robed students looked up at Master in stunned silence, and with a practiced move, Master lopped off the cat’s head. It fell to the ground like an overripe pomegranate. And it came to pass that later a student who had been out gathering alms returned to the temple and, hearing the gossip of the day, confronted his Master.

“And what would you have done?” the Master asked.

The student took off his sandals, placed them on his head, and walked backwards from the room.

Master called after him, “You would have saved the cat!”

So when false Marie dipped her head low into the pit and unhinged her jaw to show me her long tongue with its little face, its little scowling General Eisenhower face, I did the absurd thing and took her cheeks into my hands and rubbed my lips against her hanging horselip. I stroked her wet straw hair and whispered “Oh Marie, sweet sweet Marie,” and soulkissed the shoggoth. She melted in my arms. Really. A keening rose up from among the rest of them, and the slick jelly under my feet once again turned to rocky earth. Some retreated, others gave up the ghost entirely and just imploded, sucking themselves into their own pits of dark nothing. Poor Marie sizzled and smoked around me, making my pores tingle. She was trying to gain a more physical entré, but I was safe for now. The fog that enveloped me smelled of landfill, and it felt for a long moment that I was in between. Not Dreamland, not old terra firma, just the waking-up-in-the-morning world of blurry shapes and voices. Then the sun pierced the fog, with great holy rays. It was dawn. I was alone again, right at the edge of the bluffs. I felt the ocean on my face.

It took me only a few minutes to scramble down the shore where I found the squares again. They were dead, to a man and woman. Some bashed against the rocks after a great fall, others bobbed in the surf, face-down, bloated and burnt all at once. A few dozen of them there were, maybe a hundred, all in the finest clothing they had, all drifting out to sea or caught up in jaws of stone and muddy sand. I stood out on the jetty and watched a few of the carcasses, fat from tv dinners and Organization Man jobs, float out into the drink. I sat and watched them for a long time while the sun rose behind me and painted the Pacific, red, then gold, then deepest blue. I ate an apple from my rucksack and glanced around, to see if anyone had left behind a purse or a wallet, some identification. I wasn’t ready to make like a vulture and pick at these poor souls quite yet.

Hard to notice at first, but the tide was heavier than I expected. Waves pushed up over the rocks, claiming the bodies on the shore. I had to retreat from the jetty and hustle back up the cliff. The waters rose higher than I’d ever seen them, and I looked out to the horizon to see why.

The island was huge, or close, or somehow in a warp of space like a mirage. Miles out to sea but right up against my face in the same instant, I could see the hideous swirls and cut runes on well-worn granite ruins and the whole line of the shore at once. Craggly harbors lined not with boats, but with slick lobster-squid. Thick slabs of stone atop strata of crushed bone, the bedchamber of an Elder God. No gulls circled its beaches, no trees lived there or even stood defiant in petrified death. Even the crumbled doorways had been built for something other than Earthmen. Between me and it, there was only a short boat ride’s worth of sea and a trail of white bodies, drifting towards their new dead home.

R’lyeh is risen.

Move Under Ground is available now at Amazon.com.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from Nick Mamatas. For more information about this author’s works, please visit Nick-Mamatas.com.

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Dance ‘Til Sunrise

The definitive companion to Vampire: The Requiem.

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive excerpt from this new Vampire: the Requiem sourcebook from White Wolf. Danse Macabre is available at Amazon.com and RPGNow.com.

Developer note: The Danse Macabre presents a wide range of new content and options. I’m especially excited about the new take on gargoyles, a concept introduced in the core book but only occasionally mentioned since. Bethany Culp brought her eerie and, dare I say it, macabre sensibilities to the subject. Allow me to introduce you to just one of the Children of the Stones.

Child of the Beloved: The Clockwork Mockingbird

Description: When not concealing itself, The Clockwork Mockingbird appears as a small, silver automaton in the form of a delicate songbird. The Clockwork Mockingbird perches in wait near a vampire haven, usually within the leaves of a nearby tree or beneath the eaves of a neighboring building, until an uninvited vampire enters its master’s territory. When an uninvited guest approaches the protected area’s vicinity, the gargoyle whirrs to life and takes to the sky in swift flight, calling out in a clear, urgent voice. With the supernatural ability of Mimicry (see below), the Clockwork Mockingbird deceives and attracts the attention of the intruder in order to attempt to lure him away from its master’s haven.

Rank: 2

Materials Needed: pure silver, a handful of songbird feathers, a pocket watch

Vitae Cost: 8

Supernatural Aspects:

Mimicry: Using Mimicry, the automaton attempts to attract the attention, concern, or curiosity of an intruder. It may play upon the intruder’s compassionate nature by imitating the sobbing or pleading of a lost child, coax him with the soft, sensual invitation of a lover, tempt a blood-starved vampire with the glib chattering of easy, mortal prey, or goad into furious pursuit by endlessly hurling humiliating taunts and insults at him from just around the corner. Once the Clockwork Mockingbird incites the trespasser to investigate further, it flits swiftly from shadow to shadow, attempting to hide itself from detection while luring him further and further away from the protected haven. If the Clockwork Mockingbird fails to lure away its target, it immediately attempts to fly swiftly to its creator to alert her that an enemy approaches.

Mimicry is an instant, resisted action, pitting the victim’s Composure + Empathy vs. the bird’s Manipulation + Expression. If the victim loses, he becomes distracted and obsessed with uncovering the noise for the remainder of the scene (but only that one scene).

Material Immunity: Being made from pure silver makes the Clockwork Mockingbird immune to being knocked out, bleeding to death, disease and wound penalties caused by damage.

You can also check out the video of Russ Bailey, Eddy Webb, Kelley Barnes and Craig Grant at White Wolf unboxing some advance copies of the book here:

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Fugitive Rachel Nolander is a newcomer to the city of Dogsland, where the rich throw parties and the poor just do whatever they can to scrape by. Supported by her brother Djoss, she hides out in their squalid apartment, living in fear that someday, someone will find out that she is the child of a demon. Corporal Jona Lord Joni is a demon’s child too, but instead of living in fear, he keeps his secret and goes about his life as a cocky, self-assured man of the law. The first book in the Dogsland Trilogy, Never Knew Another is the story of how these two outcasts meet.

Flames Rising is pleased to present this excerpt from Never Knew Another by J. M. McDermott. Never Knew Another is available now at Amazon.com.

Never Knew Another

My husband and I placed the head from the body we had found upon a rock face at the top of a hill, where the sun and moon would always fall upon it. He had worn the uniform of a king’s man in life, but he had demon in his bloodline, and he had stained the earth where he had fallen. My husband and I prayed there, with the head on the stone, to the goddess Erin, and raised our eyes to the sky, to her. We fasted and fasted all day. We drank only water when the moon slipped from behind the clouds. We prayed and we prayed.

In morning twilight, Erin granted me the vision. I cried out in pain. Where is my body? screamed the skull. Where is Rachel?

He and Rachel were lovers as true as any in the city. She left him. He died chasing her. I asked my husband if he would die for me. He said no. Jona would have said the same until the moment he realized what he had done. His mind was mine now. I could sift through his memories, if I knew what to seek; I could reach into the lives of the people around him, as they were known to him. His human mother’s hand on his face, his days and sleepless nights,and his great love all floated over the surface of my world. His human mother’s hand on his face,his days and sleepless nights,and his great love all floated on the surface of the world. I looked into my forested hills, and saw where he had walked among them—how he had seen my home and longed for his.

My husband touched my hand. Even when we were human, we spoke to each other as wolves. Anything?

His mother was human. His father is already dead. There is another demon’s child. Maybe two.

To his city, then, to walk behind his life, and search for memories. The seed of Elishta must be burned away to ash, no matter who they are or who they were. Those born to such blood pollute life where they walk.

What was his name?

Jona. There are two others—Rachel Nolander, and… The second’s name is on the tip of my tongue. They might lead to others. Give it time. His name will come. All things will come.

My husband and I had found the corpse near a bluff. We smelled it before we saw it.Something had burned a hole in the sunflower smell. When we found the corpse, it was face down, half-buried in mud and stiff and cold.

Everything living had died where the tainted blood pooled. Tiny red mushrooms—all deadly—sprouted like warts. This noxious corpse wore the uniform of a king’s man. My husband had frowned.I was lucky, the last time. There was only the one. He had no brothers or sisters. These two others may lead to more as we find them.

My beloved had found one long ago, when he was a young man, and I was not yet born. After he killed it, the poison of the man’s blood left him sick for months. It burned off all his hair. I look at him and cannot imagine him without his long, silver hair all down his back. He had told me stories from that demon’s memories, of a life spent in hiding in back alleys and hillsides. The demon only went into cities to steal pigeon cages, and baby pigeons. He had loved to watch his pet birds fly. When he was found, all his Never knew another pigeons had to be killed and burned.No one could allow hawks and cats to catch them and spread the stain from the demon’s sweaty palms stroking their backs.

Demon children were not common anymore. The Nameless of Elishta had been driven deep underground, where they could not make children with human mothers. We found this one a grown man, dead on the ground, like an artifact from ancient times.

We had pulled his head loose from his body, with thick leather between our hands and it. We had to be careful not to get any blood on our skin.We had placed it on a stone in full light of sun and moon, and Erin blessed me with the demon child’s mind.

My husband and I pulled the wolfskins over our backs upon our return to the place where the body had been found. We pressed our noses into the earth along the perimeter of the bluff, searching for signs that would spark my awareness—another body,a lost tool or precious thing,a smell of someone, any sign that called to Jona’s memories. Rachel’s smell was all, to him.

Her trail led north and north. We found nothing else here. He was not of the woods, like us.

Ants have no souls to lose. We gave the tainted skull back to the body while we cleaned away the bones. We planted two red queens in the his gaping mouth, and blessed them both to quicken their hungry daughters. When only bones remained, we planted tough dandelions to eat the worst of the stain from the earth. We’d harvest the first generation of dandelions before they spread their white seeds. Then, we will plant sunflowers.

This first generation of sunflowers will be short and covered in thorns, but those sunflowers’ children will be better. In a few generations, the flowers won’t need to be burned. Someday sunflowers will once again bloom here. They will be as tall as men, and smell sweet.

We led our pack of wolf brethren north along the road to track the raiders to the edge of our territory, following the trail of Rachel. We stopped at the boundary of the blasted field. The red valley was the edge of our territory. A war had ended here.

Deadly magic stopped both armies and the man who cast the spell, Lord Sabachthani, declared it a victory for his city over theirs. The spell had stopped all life where it spilled over the ground.Blasted sand, a faded red color like old blood, poisoned the ground at the boundary of the kingdoms here. My husband and I stopped at the valley’s red boundary line. We served a kingdom of men, here. We could not run past the valley with the wolves. The pack would continue on without us, hunting north. My husband and I were Walkers,not true wolves. We had to stay behind, to sift through Jona’s memories for signs of the stains of this kingdom. We howled our sorrow at our running brethren, and the dust cloud they kicked up with their paws, until we saw them at the far side, pressing on into the hills beyond. We could not mourn their passage. We had our work, for Blessed Erin. My husband and I planted new weeds at the edges of the sand. We cut down the ones that had died before they could flourish. We spread grass seeds in the red mud where runoff from the hills pooled into a puddle in the dead sands.

This old wound would have to wait.We had to hunt the demon children,and the new stains made across the land, uncontained by hills and time.

There was a watch tower from the city near this place. The king’s men there were polite,and little else.They said that some small skirmish had happened before we found the body. People had died. The ones that had been found near the watch tower were sent home to their families to be buried, and no one got sick from their bodies.That’s all they knew.Young men, all of them, and bored. They wanted us to leave so they could play cards, again, pick fights with each other, and roll dice. We were not of their world, nor they of ours. They asked us what we wanted. We asked for supplies. They gave them. As we left, I turned back and saw them slouching and rubbing their necks. Jona’s mind knew none of these boys, and none of them knew Jona.

In the city, this would change. King’s men knew each other.

The ants had been given enough time to finish their work by then. My husband and I returned to the ant-stripped bones to collect the clean skull. I lifted it gently with strips of burlap wrapped around my hands.We placed the skull inside a wicker box.

I stripped the rest of the uniform from the demon bones to give to the city proof of his heritage, if it came to that. The uniform was nearly destroyed, but enough strips of cloth and leather remained where the demon child’s acid blood hadn’t completely destroyed it that it was recognizable. I wrapped my hands in stiff soldier’s leather to do it. I knew I was being stained, but I felt nothing. It could have been any bones. I held
his skull up, turned it in my hands. If I hadn’t known he was a demon’s child,and smelled the stain,I’d have thought it the skull of a normal man. He was hardly deformed at all. He must have been a few generations removed from the father of the stain.

His memories lingered, still, where the soul had sunk into the demon-stain in the bones. I needed to keep his skull close to me to reach his mind’s remains.

We placed the uniform in the box as well.

My husband put that box inside of a bag. He put this bag inside of a larger box of solid oak. He put this box on strips of heavy burlap spread between two branches.We would drag the box back towards the city.

As we traveled, we wrapped our hands in oiled burlap as if we had been burned. We rinsed with holy oil every day until the taint faded. The city sits on a bay beside a long peninsula that noblemen had cut loose with a canal to make their island against the rest of the city. Who could blame them? The mainland side stinks of shit, smoke, and fish. It is on our land, but we never go there without a reason.

* * * * *

Never Knew Another is available now at Amazon.com.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from J M McDermott.

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In the divine struggle between good and evil, humans are hardly noticeable to the mal’akhim, but when an ancient seal is broken on the grounds of a California college campus, beings from dimensions beyond the balance of holy and unholy erupt from the earth. A retired priest and an ailing magickian must trust the mysterious Walker Between the Worlds and his skin-eating demon familiar as they step through Heisenbergian passages of probability and battle forces that are so far beyond demon they cannot be fully seen in earthly dimensions. Amidst the earthquakes and interdimensional intruders, the students and staff of California Hills University step across the boundaries of their knowledge and faith, revealing their true natures as the night erupts in earth and blood.

Flames Rising is pleased to present this excerpt from An Agreement with Hell by Dru Pagliassotti. An Agreement with Hell is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

An Agreement with Hell

Jack tightened his hands on the .45, feeling the silver crosses on its grip dig into his palms. The protective spells sewn into the lining of his jacket were playing havoc with his nerves, jangling them with discordant warnings of the presence of the mal’akhim.

The devils circled around the broken angel like ants around a dead bird, their claws and tongues tentatively touching, probing, tasting. The angel quivered. One tattered wing twitched.

Jack swore. Still alive. He slid the semiautomatic back into his jacket pocket. He wouldn’t get any thanks for blowing a hole through a member of the Heavenly Host. Instead, he slipped out his cell phone and hit speed dial.

“It’s alive,” he said.

“Dr. Frankenstein, I presume?”

“The angel. It’s alive, but there’s a pack of devils around it.”

“Save it. I’m on my way.”

“That’s not my job,” Jack protested, but Andy had already hung up. Jack folded the phone and stuffed it back into his pocket, then swiftly touched the St. Jude medallion he wore around his neck.

He edged away from the concrete pillar. One of his boots splashed in a puddle of water that was all that remained of the dried-up river.

The devils hissed, crouching and raising their sharp-muzzled faces toward him. Mirroreyes caught and reflected him, and Jack winced. Right. What would Andy do?

He’d pray.

“Pater noster, qui es in caelis….”

One of the devils opened its mouth, its wet tongue lolling in a lewd grin.

“…Sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regunum tuum….”

He forced himself to take another step forward. His heels were loud on the concrete riverbed, and the devils hissed.

“James,” the grinning devil whispered, its mirroreyes fixing on him and reflecting a fractured visage. “James, what are you doing?”

A bead of sweat ran down Jack’s face. He wiped it off and threw his long red braid over his shoulder.

“Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra.”

“Pray all you want, James. It won’t redeem you.” The devil slid from the angel’s side, its flesh slipping from shape to shape as it stalked around Jack’s heels. Its narrow head brushed his coat hem. “I think you’ll be mine when you die.”

Jack stumbled, recognizing Drink and forgetting the next line. Diabolic laughter sussurated through the shadows beneath the overpass. He heard a sound like a bottle breaking against concrete.

“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,” he said hastily, skipping to the end as the sharp scent of whiskey cut through the devils’ stink. More laughter. The devils weren’t impressed. They pressed closer, their shapes blurring as they smelled his sins and fashioned themselves into temptations.

“Have you prayed for Rose lately?” one asked, looking up at him with silver eyes. Jack recoiled. Despair. He knew that devil, too.

He knew them all. Drink and Despair, Pride and Fear, Violence and Rage, Doubt and—

Bright light swept away the shadows as Andrew’s Dodge roared down the dry riverbed, clanking and rattling. The devils lifted their heads, sniffing for the newcomer’s motives and weaknesses.

Brakes squealed and Andy yanked on the wheel, turning the Dodge sideways as it stopped. The heavy door clanked open as he stepped out.

“Get out of here, you pests.” He lifted his golden pyx. “Go on, before I send you back to hell the hard way.”

The devils vanished. Jack sagged.

“Christ! Why don’t they ever gang up on you?” he asked, wiping his forehead on the back of his leather sleeve.

“For one thing, I mind my language,” the laicized priest retorted. Jack grunted and crouched next to the angel, leaving his partner to mutter prayers before returning the pyx to his glove compartment.

The angel wasn’t in good shape. Its wings, one arm, and both legs were broken. Shards of translucent bone glittered in the headlights. Mist poured off its flesh as if it were evaporating.

Its mirroreyes reflected the same incomplete image that had been in the eyes of the devils. Jack looked away, then dragged his gaze back. The angel’s skin was too white, too smooth; radiant with an inner fire and without the pores and hairs that would mark a human. No blood showed where its flesh and bone were broken, and instead of breathing, it seemed to only, perpetually, inhale.

The angel’s resemblance to humankind was a mask hiding a truth Jack knew was unbearable to behold.

“What do you need?” he asked. “What can we do for you?”

“James Ignatius Langthorn.” The angel’s voice was strong and sweet, despite its injuries, and light poured from its lips. Jack held his hand in front of his eyes to block the glare from its words. “Andrew Thomas Markham.”

Andy knelt next to him, fumbling dark glasses from his coat pocket.

“Do you need anything?” he asked, sliding the glasses on. “A prayer? Confession?”

The angel’s one good wing fluttered. Feathers rasped against concrete with the noise of stone grinding against stone.

“Eat and know,” the angel said, evaporating into white ash.

The occult alarms rattling Jack’s nerves faded. He rocked back on his heels and looked at Andy. The former priest pulled off his sunglasses and sat still, letting them dangle from one hand.

“Why do they always do that?” Jack asked. “I hate it when they’re obscure.”

“Angels aren’t talkative.”

“Raphael was.”

“Raphael was an archangel. An archangel wouldn’t get taken down by a pack of devils.” Andy ran his thumb through the ash and crossed himself, leaving a smudge on his forehead, lips, and Hawaiian shirt. Then he dipped his thumb again and repeated the gesture for Jack.

Jack licked his lips. A fire of wine and honey burned the tip of his tongue. For one fleeting moment a single, piercing note drilled through his ears, and he saw a furrowed field streaming with blood, a bone staircase that spiraled down into darkness, worms seething through raw meat, and a hallway full of doors slamming shut.

And in the next breath, nothing.

He looked down, but a cold breeze was blowing away the rest of the angel’s powdery remains.

After a moment, the two men stood. A Styrofoam soda cup rattled down the concrete riverbed, and the wind shook a chain-link fence. Jack turned up his jacket collar. This was the first time he’d ever visited Southern California in the winter. He’d thought the weather would be warm, but even though the days stayed bright and sunny, the wind held a bite.

Andy checked his watch.

“We’d better get on the road,” he said. “It’s almost four. If we hurry, we’ll be off the 405 before rush hour.”

They didn’t discuss the angel until they’d picked up a late lunch—or an early dinner—at McDonalds. The sun was low by the time the battered Dodge pulled up in the campus parking lot. California Hills University looked deserted, students and faculty disinclined to linger outside in December’s chill. A few lights streamed through the curtains of the apartments in the tiny visiting faculty complex, but nobody peered out to wave to them as they hurried up the walk.

Jack set the greasy bags on Andy’s kitchen table while his friend woke up his laptop and began to peck at the keyboard.

“Two Big Macs, fries, an apple pie, and a milkshake,” Jack grumbled, separating out his salad and throwing the dressing packets into the trash. He opened Andy’s refrigerator and pulled out the low-fat, low-sodium dressing he’d bought three days before. “God must have given you a plenary indulgence for cholesterol.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Andy grunted, not really listening. “You saw a field covered with blood?”

“Yeah. Bone stairs. Worms or maggots. Doors slamming.”

“Any idea where that field was located?

“Could’ve been any field in the world.” Jack dropped into a metal folding chair and emptied the dressing over the salad, turning it into balsamic soup. “I know some songs about bloody battlefields, but it looked like plowed land to me.”

“The blood could be literal or symbolic.”

“Life would be a lot easier if angels saw the world the way we do.”

“No doubt. And religion would be a lot easier if the Bible were literal.”

“Does saying things like that ever get you in trouble in the religion department?

“That? No.”

“Something else?” Jack looked over at his friend, who was frowning at the laptop screen. A clear, bluish light lit his face, reminding Jack of the radiance that had streamed from the angel’s lips as it had spoken his name.

His name. He knew, intellectually, that God was aware of his name, that God knew him more intimately than any mortal could. But to know didn’t mean to forgive. The dark, cancerous-looking holes in the reflection that he’d seen in the devils’ and angel’s eyes served as a grim reminder that he was a long way away from a state of grace.

“Nothing important. I’m caught up in an administrative pissing match,” Andy said. “I told you my invitation came directly from the university president, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. They’re rebuilding the religion department, and he wanted a Catholic viewpoint.” Jack shrugged. “Strange choice for a Lutheran university.”

“It’s not rabidly Lutheran, and there’s a large Catholic population in the area.” Andy made a face as the computer showed him something he didn’t want to see. He stood, running a hand through his white hair, and joined Jack at the kitchen table. “You know, I don’t think there’s any significant difference between a pint of low-fat dressing and a few ounces of regular dressing. Why are you on a diet, anyway? You look fine.”

“Don’t you watch TV? Half the country is fat.”

“You’re not. Now that you’re on the wagon, you look a lot better.” Andy unwrapped his burger, using the paper as a plate, and dumped his fries next to it. Jack eyed the crispy golden morsels with open longing. “Help yourself. A couple fries won’t kill you. This isn’t some kind of midlife crisis, is it? Or could it be, pray God, you’ve finally got a girlfriend?”

Jack made a disgusted noise and grimly scooped up his floating strips of iceberg lettuce and toothpick-shaped carrot slices. For a celibate man, Andy seemed intent on Jack finding someone to replace Rose.

Nobody would replace Rose.

“Just stayin’ healthy,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” Andy’s gaze was probing. “You’ve been cutting back on the cigarettes, too. That’s good. That’s really good.”

“It’s your apartment.” Jack avoided his friend’s eyes. “So, you gonna tell me what we were doing today?”

Andy hesitated a moment, then let the change of subject stand.

“You know as much as I do.” He looked solemn as he wiped his mouth on a thin paper napkin and leaned back in his chair. “Someone emailed me those GPS coordinates anonymously. Someone who knew the pack would be on a hunt.”

“Anonymously.” Jack mentally dredged through what little he’d gleaned about computers from TV shows and mystery novels. “A hacker?”

“It doesn’t have to be that complicated. The message could have been sent through any remailer that strips off the return address.”

“Is that hard to do?”

Andy smiled. “You know, Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’m twenty years older than you are, and I know more about the Internet than you do.”

“I don’t have time for the Internet.” Jack reached into his shirt pocket and laid a pack of Marlboros on the kitchen table. He glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes. He’d let himself have a cigarette in twenty minutes.

The sound of a broken bottle echoed in Jack’s memory. He restlessly flipped the cigarette pack over.

Andy had removed all the bottles from the house the day Jack had arrived. There was nothing in the apartment to tempt him except memories and old habits and the lingering smell of whiskey conjured up for him that afternoon.

Jack looked at the clock again. Not even a minute had passed. He stood, grabbing the trash off the table.

“So, who wants you involved in mal’akhim business?”

“Could be anybody.” Andy kept eating. Jack jammed the bags into the can under the sink, catching a glimpse of himself in the black mirror of the kitchen window. No holes in that reflection, just a man in his mid-forties affecting aging-biker chic. He refocused and looked outside at the lights across the narrow courtyard. His heart was pounding. He took a deep breath, trying to force it back into a slow, steady beat.

“So what’s going on in the department?” he asked after a moment, turning his back on the darkness outside.

“The chair doesn’t want me.”

“Doesn’t he take orders from the president?”

“She, and yes, technically she does, after she takes orders from the dean and provost, anyway. But they disagree over which direction the religion department should be taking. The administration and regents want the department to focus on the Old Testament, and the chair wants more social justice-type professors.”

“But you’re an Old Testament candidate.”

“Me and Todd, the other visiting professor. I think we were both hired over the chair’s head. And I don’t think either of us is going to get our contract renewed next year.”

Jack walked back to the kitchen table and sat down. Andy had finished his burgers and was picking at fries and slurping on his chocolate milkshake. Jack wanted to light a cigarette just to kill the smell. His stomach growled.

“Todd’s the guy across the courtyard?”

“Yes. Apocalyptic scholarship in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.”

“You two get along?”

“We haven’t talked much. He’s a big man, but quiet, even at departmental meetings. He works well with the students, though.”

Jack picked up a burger wrapper and looked at the nutritional information, reminding himself why he was sticking to salads. “Don’t the students like you? I’d think they’d get all excited about angelology.”

“I don’t get to teach angelology. Two of my classes are Introduction to Christian Studies, and I’ve got a small special-topics course on Christian-centered cults. I talk about angels a little there, but the students don’t like what I have to say.” Andy finished the fries. “They think angels are sweet, cuddly little things that watch over them and keep them safe. You should see them squirm when I make them take a closer look at what the b’nei elohim actually do in the Bible.”

Jack nodded, crushing the wrapper into a tight little ball.

“Anyway,” Andy continued, “it’s all too old-fashioned for the chair. She doesn’t think the Old Testament is relevant.”

“Your position at Belleville College is still secure, right?”

“Oh, as secure as it ever was. I’m sure I’ll have no trouble going back. I thought CHU might make a nice place to retire, but I’ll do all right in Belleville, if I have to.”

“Retire?” Jack dropped the wrapper and studied his friend. “You?”

“I’m sixty-five, Jack. I’m ready.”

“What would you do?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Andy smiled. “Buy a Harley and hit the road with you, maybe. Find America and fight the forces of Satan.”

“Christ.” Jack shook his head. “You’re not serious.”

“No, not really. I’m at more of an RV stage of life. I might buy a big old Streamline, tour the national parks, and write a few more books. I hear there’s a senior ranger program that would reduce my camping fees.”

“You been thinking about this.” The idea of Andy retiring troubled Jack.

“A little. The recession slowed me down, but I’d like to be out in five years. That’s probably another reason the chair doesn’t want to hire me—she’d prefer younger blood. I mean, that’s what caused the problem in the first place. The campus was founded just over sixty years ago, and now all the faculty who were hired back when this was Cal Hills College are retiring and leaving the departments short-handed.”

“I didn’t know this place was so young. Guess that explains all the construction,” said Jack. “So why hire an old man like you at all?”

“Academic excellence.” Andy grinned. “I’ve got age and the Old Testament against me, but my publication record balances that out. CHU might decide it’s worth a five-year investment just to get my name on its professor emeritus list.”

“This is why I work for myself,” Jack said, shaking his head. “I hate all that bureaucratic wheeling and dealing.”

“So do I, but I enjoy a steady paycheck and benefits. Not to mention a pension. Do you ever think about where you’re going to be when you’re my age?”

“Too late for me to worry about that now,” Jack said, looking away. “I don’t have much of a resume. Folk singing, bike repair, and high magick. Not exactly CEO skills.”

“Motorcycle repair might get you somewhere.”

“In a small town, maybe. But it wouldn’t be the kind of job you’re talking about, with pensions and—and health insurance and all that.”

He could feel Andy’s eyes on him.

“This might be a rude question, Jack, but do you have any savings at all?”

“Nope.” Not anymore. He’d had a few thousand put away for a rainy day, but then it had rained, and the hospital bills had eaten up everything he’d saved. “Don’t matter. I’m not gonna live to your age.”

“But you’re eating better and smoking less. That’s a good start. And if you retired from the magick business….”

Jack gazed at his reflection in the window and shrugged, feeling uncomfortable.

“Come on, what’s going on?” Andy demanded. “I’ve been biting my tongue for days, waiting for you to start talking. Why are you here? Is that angel linked to you? Did you show up on my doorstep with the mal’akhim on your tail?”

“No!” Jack gave his friend a startled look. “No, nothing like that. I told you, I was working with Ma D’Orsy, helping her and her family rebuild and lay down some new blessings. Then Pearl gave me a call and I headed up to Chicago for a few weeks, but it was nothing occult, just tracking down her oldest.”

“He quit his medication again?”

“Yeah. Ended up in St. Louis.”

“And after that you drove here to see me? Without even calling?”

Jack hesitated. “I shoulda called. I had kind of an accident, and I wasn’t thinking too well—”

“Jack,” said Andy, “would you please try to talk like a man who almost earned his college degree? What does ‘kind of an accident’ mean, anyway?”

Jack began playing with the cigarette pack again.

“It was kind of a stroke.”

“What?” Andy straightened up. “A real stroke? Or a magickal attack?”

“A real stroke,” Jack said, looking away. “Doc said I got high blood pressure, touch of atherosclerosis. Too much drinking and smoking and stress.”

“Good heavens, Jack, why didn’t you call me? Where were you? You know I would have flown out.” Andy sounded more angry than worried.

“I know. I didn’t want you bothered on my account.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said. How bad was it?”

“Well, I’m here.” He’d never liked talking about personal matters. He hunched his shoulders, stripping the cellophane off the Marlboros. “I got lucky. No permanent damage. They wanted me to stick around, but what the hell, Andy, I don’t have insurance. I can’t afford expensive drugs. I’ve been tryin’ to stay a little healthier on my own.”

“How long ago was it?” Andy was at his laptop again, working on the keyboard. “Did you get your medical records when you left?”

“October. I didn’t ask for any paperwork. I just wanted out of there as fast as I could.”

Andy growled, his eyes moving over the screen. Jack studied the scuffed toes of his boots in the harsh kitchen light.

“Did you have surgery?”

“Just drugs. I guess it wasn’t a real serious stroke.”

“All strokes are serious. I can’t believe you didn’t call me. I thought we were friends. And you’re still smoking?”

Jack dropped the pack. “I’m trying to quit. I tried the patches, but they don’t do anything for me, and they’re expensive. And this is why I didn’t say anything. I knew you’d make a fuss.”

Andy clicked a button, still reading.

“You have to quit. Cold turkey.”

“I’m working on it. Let me handle this my way, Andy.” The pack had never looked so enticing. Jack looked back at his friend. “And get off the computer, would you? I hate talking to your back.”

Andy pulled his hands away from the keyboard and turned.

“All right. Then talk to my face.” He stood and walked back to the kitchen, pulling the curtain over the sink window. “How did it happen?”

* * * * *

An Agreement with Hell is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from Apex Book Company.

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1. Preview of Never Knew Another by J M McDermott
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3. Preview of The Changed by B. J. Burrow

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an inside look at the design process for Scenes of the Embrace, a brand new toolkit released from White Wolf Publishing to be used with its Vampire: the Requiem role-playing game.

This exclusive article is broken up into two parts. First, we give you an overview of the design process for this product, which was inspired by Will Hindmarch’s design from Scenes of Frenzy. After you read Eddy Webb and Monica Valentinelli’s exchange, stick around for an exclusive preview from this new e-book.

Behind Scenes of the Embrace

EDDY: For a long time, I’ve wanted to do another anthology of Storytelling Adventure System (SAS) scenes for players and Storytellers. The vampire’s Embrace is a pivotal moment in their existence, but it’s not something we’ve traditionally spent a lot of time on, either in products or at the table, and I wanted to do something with that. In talking it over with Russell [the Vampire line developer], we kicked around the idea that the vampire’s pivotal motivation to Embrace is their Vice, and that’s when the project came together in my mind.

MONICA: The idea of creating scenes based on a character’s Vice was really interesting to me, but it was also a challenge. At first, I found myself writing lots of characters and mini-adventures for each Embrace. These were scenes I wanted to play or run in my own chronicle. Eddy gave me some feedback on what I had written and that’s when it dawned on me: he was looking for something less character-specific so that any Storyteller could use these scenes. His feedback really sank in and helped shape a strong template for my rewrite that was more plug-in-play than adventure-based.

EDDY: I’ll be honest – I was pretty brutal in the first round of my redlines. Monica had some interesting ideas, but it just wasn’t working out. The concepts were too specific – more like pre-generated characters than templates that players and Storytellers can use to inform and shape their own experiences. She was providing a lot of very pretty set pieces, and I was looking for a well-crafted set of tools. We exchanged a lot of emails on the topic, and she went back to the drawing board. What I got back next time, though, just blew me away.

MONICA: One of the things we talked about was how to reference the mortal being Embraced in a particular scene. The idea was that if a Storyteller wanted to use one of these scenes in her World of Darkness chronicle, a mortal character could actually become a Kindred through her game. So, I introduced a new term called a “candidate” and added some character concepts to help flesh out the scenes. Coupled with the covenant goals and reactions to each Embrace, there’s a lot of fodder for Storytellers to draw off of.

EDDY: We did go through a third draft, which is unusual for a product like this, but the next time around it was a lot more like polishing a gem instead of blasting through concrete. I know a product is going to be good when I get excited when reading it. I caught myself sending snippets of passages to my co-workers to share with them. That’s one of the secret thrills of being in development – I get to see this cool stuff before anyone else in the world does, and a good manuscript reminds me all over again why I love the World of Darkness.

MONICA: Some scenes were easier to write than others because I had an idea of how the covenants might react to a new neonate. For those scenes, I basically worked backward from what might happen in someone’s game. For example, both of the Pride Embraces were a no-brainer for me. Other scenes were a little harder to write, but for those I dug more deeply into the setting. I have to say, I really enjoyed writing the Gluttony and Sloth Embraces. I kept thinking how much fun it would be to play through those in a chronicle. Creepy!

EDDY: Scenes of the Embrace is a different kind of product. It’s not entirely an adventure, and it’s not really a Storyteller book, either. As much as I hate to abuse this metaphor, it really is a toolbox designed to focus on one aspect of Vampire games. There are fourteen different scenes that can help make any character’s Embrace a more memorable and dramatic experience.

Preview of Scenes of the Embrace

In this preview, we were provided a snippet from the Gluttony scene called “Taste.” Each scene offers an introduction. The paragraphs that you are about to read follow the introduction to flesh out ideas for the Storyteller to draw from. First, you’ll read a brief overview of the scene. Then, you’ll hear what your Kindred’s Beast has to say.

Scene of the Embrace: Taste

Overview

The sire has just fed upon a vessel and is pleasantly surprised by how good it tastes. Maybe she savors the aftertaste of her blood, or maybe she’s aroused by its sweet, coppery fragrance. Whether the sire convinces herself that there’s something unusual about this particular vessel’s blood or not, she may find it hard to pull herself away from it. Since it will be a few nights before the vessel regains his full health, the sire is faced with a tough decision. Can she wait that long to drink her blood again? If she drains his blood dry and kills him in the process, will she be happy knowing she will never taste his blood again? Would she risk creating a ghoul if there’s even a remote chance that he will die? Wouldn’t it be better to Embrace this vessel, fill it up, and drink from it over and over again?

Description

You’re not sure why, but you’re positive that this vessel’s blood smells and tastes differently than the filthy blood of other mortals. Tangy and sweet, your mouth explodes with flavor long after the blood fills your mouth. Maybe this vessel is sacred. Maybe it changes ordinary, boring blood into a perfect and divine fluid. Damn the vessel’s fragile body. It won’t recover fast enough for you to safely feed without killing it and you know it. Of course, you could always Embrace him and feed upon him again. Hell, you could even bring him a few other vessels before you do. More blood that way. More of his sweet blood, that is. And it’s all for you.

To pick up your copy of Scenes of the Embrace, head on over to RPGNow.com today.

Related posts:

1. Author Interview for White Wolf’s Paths of Storytelling
2. Scenes of the Embrace SAS Review
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The lightning-paced conclusion to the Stone of Tymora trilogy by best-selling author R.A. Salvatore and his son…

Featuring the sage words and signature swordwork of R.A. Salvatore’s best-selling character Drizzt Do’Urden, this final book of the Stone of Tymora trilogy is packed with action, magic, intrigue, and a heart-stopping twist that Salvatore fans won’t want to miss.

Flames Rising is pleased to offer our readers an excerpt from this book by Bob and Geno Salvatore. Be sure to check out our interview with the Salvatores about the Stone of Tymora series here at Flames Rising. The Sentinels is available now at Amazon.com.

The Sentinels

Thirteen thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight. Thirteen thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine. The darkness was absolute. My pirate captors had left me no torch, and the sun had set long ago.

Thirteen thousand nine hundred twenty-four. Thirteen thousand nine hundred twenty-five. The flicker of their campfire had traced its way down the short, east-facing tunnel to the locked door to a tiny chamber, my cell. The light had been brighter this night than the previous few nights, and the uneven crack at the bottom of the door had allowed plenty of light in. But that light, too, had finally gone out.

Fourteen thousand and seven. Heartbeats, that is, since the light had gone out. I kept my legs crossed, sitting as comfortably as I could in the cramped cave. I held my
breathing steady, keeping count as precisely as I could. Of course my count would be inexact, but that was hardly the point. The pirates had been drinking heavily,
like every night. Most or all of them had surely passed out. Still, I figured to play it safe I’d give them three hours so the last stragglers could drift off to sleep.

Fourteen thousand eighty-eight. Three hours, fourteen thousand four hundred heartbeats. Soon. Neither my hands nor my feet were bound. I had gained the pirate captain’s trust. Or, more to the point, I had convinced him that he wouldn’t hear the rest of my story if he didn’t treat me better. And how he had wanted to hear
my story!

But I had no intention of letting him hear the rest of it. I had no intention of spending another day here at all.

Fourteen thousand one hundred fifty-six. The door lock would pose little challenge. I’d been saving some bones from my meals, and as I mostly got scraps, bones were in plentiful supply. I selected two, thin enough to fit in the lock, firm but not rigid, less likely to snap. They would be my lock picks, my key.

Fourteen thousand two hundred thirty-seven.

There could be guards posted at the entrance. I might be able to sneak past them. Maybe I’d have to fight my way out. Either way, I figured I could handle it. I had to, after all.

Fourteen thousand three hundred and five. My story would have come to an end eventually. And when that happens, the pirates would kill me, of that I had no doubt. So maybe they’d kill me as I tried to escape, but at least I’d die doing something. I had little dread left of the prospect of the end. It was the prospect of the end on someone else’s terms that really frightened me.

And I would not let that happen.

Fourteen thousand four hundred. Time to go. The door made hardly a sound, and my footsteps made even less. My assumption was correct: two guards sat at the end of the tunnel.

But they’d been drinking and were snoring loudly. I took a cutlass from one of them, feeling much better with a sword in my hand, even that unwieldy piece of metal. Then I crept past onto the narrow, sandy beach. The moon was nearly full, the sky clear, and the view was better than I’d hoped it would be. I knew from observing
the sunlight that the cave faced east. What I didn’t know was that the mainland was visible from the beach.

Pirates lay strewn about wherever they’d passed out, empty bottles and half-eaten food lying next to many of them. It seemed they’d made no attempt whatsoever to find even a comfortable place to lie down. They were sprawled across rocks, flotsam, the various wreckage of and loot from ships.

To my left, the beach extended out of sight. The debris, including the hulks of many wrecked ships, stretched far. A quick glance out to sea revealed the reason for the wrecks: not a quarter mile offshore, several huge rocks jutted out of the water. The tide was low, almost at its lowest point. At high tide, those rocks would be invisible, the strait treacherous to anyone not intimately familiar with those rocks.

To my right, the beach wrapped around a rocky jut. The pirate ship would be there, I figured. A fine hiding place the island made for pirates. It also made it tough for me to get out of there. No boats rested along the beach. I would either have to take some of the flotsam and use it as a raft or head for the ship itself and try to steal a launch. And the ship would be better guarded than some desolate stretch of drunk-and debris-laden beach.

I moved down the beach, looking for a promising piece of driftwood, but nothing stood out. I decided I would have to risk the pirate ship, so I headed for the rocky spur.
A cave dug into the side of it—perhaps a passage through? It was worth a look, so I crept closer.

A light flared within, and I ducked out of sight. A figure emerged from the cave, carrying a torch. Another followed him, and another after that.

“Impressive,” the third figure said. He didn’t look directly at me, but I knew he was addressing me. “Or, it woulda been impressive if it warn’t a setup.”

I recognized the voice—it was the pirate captain. He couldn’t have seen me, I figured, so I stayed quiet. But the beach behind me was suddenly filled with light. Torches flared wherever I’d seen a pirate passed out.

Soon, all those lights moved my way. They’d been watching me through their half-closed eyes. They knew where I was, so I stepped out into the light.

“Fine, then,” I said. “Which of you should I kill first?”

The pirate captain laughed. “None, I think,” he said. “I think ye should sit down an’ tell us more o’ yer story.”

“And why would I do that when you’ll just kill me at the end?”

“Aye, we might, a’ tha’,” he said. “But we’ll kill ye just th’ same if ye don’t speak as if ye do. An’ if ye speak, then at the least someone will know yer story.”

The pirates gathered around, all holding torches, all but one brandishing a weapon. I held up my stolen cutlass to the unarmed pirate, and he laughed at me. His fellows soon joined him.

“Why the setup?” I asked. “Why let me get past the guards at all?”

“I wanted ter know if ye really were capable o’ what ye been saying,” he said. “Ye tell a fine tale, but tha’ don’ make it true. What we seen t’night, though, tha’ makes me think ye ain’t lying.”

I thought for a moment. “Fine,” I said. “Where did we leave off?”

“On a ship, leaving an island,” the captain replied. He motioned to the crew. Some of the pirates took seats on rocks. Others brought bits of flotsam and jetsam and made a pile nearby. One dropped a torch into the pile, and soon we had a roaring fire. “Ye’d found yer lost stone, watched that demon Asbeel plunge into the sea, and ye were sailing away.”

“Sailing away on a ship, with no wind, and hoofbeats approaching,” I said. “Indeed . . .”

* * *

The Sentinels is available now at Amazon.com.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from Wizards of the Coast.

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Hard to believe I released Little Fears Nightmare Edition over a year ago. The initial reception blew me away and you are still picking it up, playing it, and sharing your stories with me. I enjoyed working on the new edition of the classic game but, by the time I finished the book, I was pretty burned out on it. I ended up taking a break from it, working on other projects and recharging my batteries. All in all, the time away did a lot of good as I’m more excited about Little Fears now than I have been in a long time.

This past September, after a hectic summer, I decided to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the game’s release by committing to a monthly series of standalone, ready-to-play episodes called Campfire Tales. I put up the first in October. Beggars Night tells the story of some monsters who are looking for the perfect costume for their waking master. The second, called The Fall Harvest, is set in one of my favorite types of places (an apple orchard) during my favorite time of the year. The Fall Harvest is about a little girl whose love for her grampy’s farm brings all kinds of monstrous trouble to the unsuspecting attendees of the local fall festival.

The folks at Flames Rising, who ran my 13 Doors column promoting Little Fears Nightmare Edition last year, asked if I wouldn’t mind them putting up a promo of what I’m doing with the line. I was honored they asked and quickly agreed.

The following is an excerpt from the latest release in the line, Campfire Tales #3: The Longest Night of Your Life is about some kids who wake up in a room that seems like a dream but turns into a nightmare. If you like what you see, all the Campfire Tales are available now through DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. Also, you can check out www.littlefears.com for the latest information on the game–including news about the upcoming film! Enjoy.

Remember: Sleep tight, and bite the bed bugs back.

Scene #1

Last night, on Christmas Eve, the kids went to sleep in their beds, visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. (Unless they don’t celebrate Christmas of course then they were probably dreaming of something else.) The next morning, while it’s still dark outside, the kids wake up in their bedrooms. And that’s where we begin.

As far as the bedrooms are concerned, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. If the child usually sleeps with the door open, it may strike them as weird that it’s closed but everything else is as it was when they went to sleep.

The next logical step, especially for those anticipating Kris Kringle’s nocturnal visitation, is to throw open the door and head out to see what goodies the fat man left them in their stockings and under the tree. And this is where it becomes apparent something’s not quite right. When the kids open their doors, instead of what they would normally find, they see a brightly lit hallway, stark tile on the floor, with numerous differently colored and decorated doors. The hallway leads to a room with a ten-foot Christmas tree in the center, beautifully decorated with twinkling lights, colored glass bulbs, and strings of shimmering tinsel. The base is draped in a red felt skirt and the remains of Christmas morning litter the ground: shredded paper, unraveled bows, and stacks of every toy and game your kid could ever want; their boxes strewn around the room in varying stages of obliteration.

This is doubly strange if the child’s family doesn’t celebrate Christmas.

This is a Dramatic Scene. As the kids converge on the central room, they’ll likely have a lot of questions. No one knows anything more than another about what’s going on (though some may fake it). Let the kids look around a bit before dropping them into the next scene. There’s not a lot to explore, just the hallway, the room, and the bedrooms, but there’s a lot to accept as the weirdness and limitation of their situation sinks in.

Let’s cover some ground rules about this shared area in which the kids find themselves.

If anyone does a headcount, they’ll see that there are two more doors than kids (so if you have four kids in the cast, six doors line the hallway). Also, this isn’t a dream, so all real world physics apply. Punching or pinching or kicking hurts. Running into a door hurts too and won’t do much good besides. The exceptions are: the windows don’t break, the doors have some special rules, and the tree can’t be knocked over. Other than that, everything is here as it is at home.

Some basic exploration and experimentation will reveal the following:

The Hallway

Folks can only open the doors to the individual bedrooms if the kid who sleeps there allows them. This means a simple “No” (spoken or not) is enough to stop someone from going into a room. If a room is shared by two or more kids, only one needs to give permission and any kids who sleep in the room can’t be locked out this way.

The first extra door is white and has a small (foot square) chalk board tacked onto it. A used piece of pink chalk dangles from a string connected to the corner of the board. The second door is heavy and made of white metal. It’s cool to the touch and it slides instead of turning out or in. The kids can’t open either of them.

The Room

As big as an elementary school gymnasium, the room is adorned in postcard-perfect season décor. Most of the room is quite bright but darkness fills the corners. The main source is lighting is the tree and a few recessed lights.

Aside from the hallway full of doors there is just one other door on the wall that opposes the hallway entrance. It’s a large door, dark and wooden, and stands about nine feet tall. Attempts to open it don’t work, even those powered by Belief.

The room has a few windows, each of which show a darkened snow-covered lawn. It’s not actively snowing but it probably just stopped as the pillowy top glistens and is unmarred by animal prints or kids trudging through it. It must look out over a backyard or something because you can’t see a street or any other houses. The windows cannot be broken, if anyone is vandalism-inclined, and they’re set into their frames and have no mechanisms that allow them to be open or shut.

The tree is a real tree. The presents are real too. The tags on them read some variation of “To Tamos, From Santa” in shaky handwriting.

The Bedrooms

Hard to say what the bedrooms look like. If the kids enter any of the rooms, have the owner give a quick summary—just the highlights please—of what’s in their room.

Once the kids give the area a good once-over and everyone’s anxiety is a bit tweaked, the big door off the main room opens and an enthusiastic boy bounds out, huge smile on his face, arms open wide.

“Finally!” he yells, shutting the door behind him. “New friends!”

And with that, the scene ends.

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1. Little Fears Nightmare Edition Preview Door #12: Turning the Pages
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On sale December 15, 2010 in comic shops is MOUSE GUARD: THE BLACK AXE #1, launching a brand-new volume of the popular MOUSE GUARD series by David Petersen.

MOUSE GUARD: THE BLACK AXE #1 (OF 6)
Retail Price: $3.50 U.S.
Page Count: 24 pages
Format: saddle bound, 8” x 8”, full color
On-sale Date: December 15, 2010
Written by David Petersen
Illustrated by David Petersen
Cover by David Petersen

The Eisner Award-winning MOUSE GUARD returns with THE BLACK AXE, a third volume of the critically acclaimed series. Set in 1115, this prequel to MOUSE GUARD VOL. 1: FALL 1152 fulfills the promise the wise oldfur Celanawe made to Lieam the day his paw first touched the Black Axe: to tell the young warrior about the mouse who first wielded the deadly weapon. The arrival of distant kin takes Celanawe on an adventure that will carry him across the sea to uncharted waters and lands, all while unraveling the legend of Farrer, the blacksmith who forged the mythic Black Axe.

Flames Rising is pleased to present a Preview of MOUSE GUARD: THE BLACK AXE #1:

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The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino. Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the introduction to this new collection by Kate Bernheimer.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

Despite its heft, this collection is a tiny hall of mirrors in the world’s giant house of fairy tales. Fairy tales comprise thousands of stories written by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. A volume published in the mid–twentieth century that purported to catalog every type of folktale in existence had more than twenty-five hundred entries; since then, countless new stories have joyously entered the world via new translations, folkloric research, and artists working in a multitude of forms.

Readers love fairy tales. Even the most virulent critics of fairy tales can’t look away. With their false brides, severed limbs, and talking donkeys, they are hypnotic. “All great novels are great fairy tales,” wrote Nabokov. I would argue that all great narratives are great fairy tales . . . whatever their shape (novel, novella, short story, poem).

. . .

I was weaned on fairy tales. My grandfather, who may or may not have worked for Disney (nobody is certain) and who may or may not have worked with a Bostonian piano thief (we think he did), screened fairy-tale films in his basement for me and my siblings when we were young. The flying beds, cackling witches, and warbling birds shaped my being. In combination with terrifying Holocaust footage screened at my temple—and stories of burning bushes, singing “spring turtles,” and parting seas—the consolation of magical stories was directly imprinted on me. I was shy, happiest inside books; their open world beckoned and took me in. Over the past seven years, as founder and editor of Fairy Tale Review, I have seen the passionate interest fairy tales hold for the thousands of writers who submit to every issue. I founded the journal out of a sense that literary works based on fairy tales, like the lonely heroes of fairy tales themselves, lacked homes. I was immediately flooded with very good manuscripts. Many hopeful correspondents are well-known authors whose magical works have been turned down by older literary publications; others are true believers and have devoted their lives to folklore in unusual ways—creating fairy-tale newspapers, selling homemade fairy-tale wares, producing freely distributed fairy-tale comics; still others are grandfathers, mothers, teachers, biologists, or students who as new writers feel comfortable trying on the fairy-tale form. I am touched by every submission; each shines with love for fairy tales.

. . .

I’ve had the privilege of introducing many students to the fairy tale’s strange history, so carefully studied by such scholars as Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes, who teach us that originally fairy tales were not directed toward children, though they were overheard by youngsters around the hearth, and that they function in an almost totemic way for both young and old. My love of fairy tales drives all of my writing, whether a novel, a short story, or a book for children. I have the honor of making my day-to-day work the celebration of fairy tales. All of this—the journal editorship, the teaching of craft, the casual conversations, the life of a writer—reflects back to me that fairy tales are simply
essential, and I want to share that with you.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is like a beloved, handmade, topsy-turvy, cool doll. I had one as a kid (perhaps you did, too): on one side was Red Riding Hood, and underneath, the grandmother and wolf; how it scared and delighted me! If you peek under this book’s voluminous skirt, you’ll find some wonderful creatures hiding here, lovers of fairy tales all: Angela Carter, Hans Christian Andersen, J. R. R. Tolkien, Italo Calvino, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Comyns, the Brothers Grimm. Next time you go to the library, please say hello to them, to their other fine fairy-tale companions, and to the scholars who have charted the history of the form: Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Ruth Bottigheimer, Donald Haase, Cristina Bacchilega, and many others.

Once you start looking, it is easy to see the variety—the sheer fractal ferocity—and intelligence of fairy tales. This collection contains stories reflective of current trends (fragment, pastiche, story-in-chapters); it also contains stories told in more linear, straightforward ways. Some of the selections pay homage to midcentury and later styles; others come poetically through modes associated with the tradition of oral folklore. You will find stories that hew closely to their enchantment, and others that announce hardly any magic—until you encounter a tiny keyhole in the wall of their language. In each instance, you will easily enter these secret gardens.

. . .

I hope this book comprises not only a fantastic reading experience for you—a reintroduction to these stories with vintage and thrilling appeal—but also a call to preserve fairy tales for future generations. For in a fairy tale, you find the most wonderful world. Yes, it is violent; and yes, there is loss. There is murder, incest, famine, and rot—all of these haunt the stories, as they haunt us. The fairy-tale world is a real world. Fairy tales contain a spell that is not false: an invocation to protect those most endangered on this earth. The meek shall inherit . . . went one of the very first stories I heard as a child. I believed it then, and still do.

Fairy tales, fairy-tale readers: This book belongs to you.

. . .

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is available now at Amazon.com.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer. Copyright © 2010 by Kate Bernheimer.

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