Flames Rising is happy to host a collection of Horror & Dark Fantasy fiction from large publishers and small press, new authors and experienced freelancers and everything in between. We have agreements with a handful of publishers to host fiction based on the worlds they have created ranging from Contested Ground Studios‘ a|state to Apophis Consortium‘s Obsidian: the Age of Judgement and a host of other settings. We also have sneak previews and excerpts of upcoming Horror & Dark Fantasy novels from time to time.

The fiction collection on Flames Rising will be listed by setting or series. Just click the “more…” link below for a complete list of the good reads we have to offer…

Halloween Horror Series:

Reflections by Jess Hartley
The Deep-Seated Bogey by Will Hindmarch
The Meh-Teh by Jason L Blair
The Hollow Wee’ Un by Matt Forbeck
The Fogcrawler by Jason Thorson
The Scarecrow by Bill Bodden
Bykovsky’s Letter by Malcolm Craig
Skulkers-in-the-Piles by David Hill
The Killer by Chuck Wendig
The Lost Girl by Matt M McElroy
The Room by John Wick
Corpse Bug by John D. Kennedy
The Kragethogil and the Reapers by Monte Cook
Red Head by Filamena Young
Cheap Labor by Jared A. Sorensen
Quisivore by Eddy Webb
Quinkana Prodigius by Scott Lette
Hounds of the Morrigan by Alana Abbott
Glaring Hunter by Jeff LaSala
Biting Water by Preston DuBose
Babylonian Mummy by Monica Valentinelli
The House Spider by Richard Dansky
Tabbinius Cats by Eloy LaSanta
The Werewolf of Bedburg by Jason L Blair
Wastelands Stalker by Jensen Toperzer
Heamogoblin by Gregor Hutton
Tear-Drop Rattler by Joe Rixman
Jimmy Sparks by Todd Cash
Massapoag by Jason Morningstar
Falling for Her by Jess Hartley
Cob’s Ladder by E. E. Knight

Pinebox, Texas:

Halloween and Fall Fest by Preston DuBose
Buried Tales of Pinebox edited by Matt M McElroy

Other Fiction Previews/Excerpts:

Amortals (Excerpt) by Matt Forbeck
A Taste of Blood and Roses (Excerpt) by David Niall Wilson
The Girls with Games of Blood (Excerpt) by Alex Bledsoe
Bone Magic by Yasmine Galenorn
The Conqueror’s Shadow by Ari Marmell
Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines
Pallid Light: The Waking Dead by William Jones
Gamer Fantastic edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
This is My Blood by David Niall Wilson
The Mermaid’s Madness by Jim C. Hines
Dark Knowledge by Keith Pyeatt
Legacy by Tom Sniegoski
Demon Mistress by Yasmine Galenorn
Blood Grove by Alex Bledsoe
Hater by David Moody

Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms:

The Sentinels (Excerpt) by Bob and Geno Salvatore
Aldwyn’s Academy (Excerpt) Nathan Meyer
Nocturne by L.D. Harkrader
The God-Catcher by Erin M. Evans
Gold Dragon Codex by R.D. Henham
Shadowrealm: Shadows Deepen (Excerpt) by Paul S. Kemp
Shadowrealm: Abelar Corrinthal (Excerpt) by Paul S. Kemp
Shadowrealm: Riven and Cale (Excerpt) by Paul S. Kemp

Tales of the Seven Dogs Society:

Lifting the Gingham Veil Excerpt by Jim Johnson

Bestial: Werewolf Apocalypse:

Chapter One: Part One by William Carl
Chapter One: Part Two by William Carl

Vampire Apocalypse:

Descent into Chaos Prologue by Derek Gunn

General Horror Fiction:

The Final Kill by Rob Stratman
Seed of Chaos by Matt Harvey
A Different Kind of Treat by Monica Valentinelli

Blood Games:

Teamwork by El Zambo
Will of the Hunter by Daniel Potter

Obsidian: the Age of Judgement:

Torment by Elizabeth Petersen
Glint by Monica Valentinelli
Triad III: Annihilation by Monica Valentinelli
Triad II: Absence by Monica Valentinelli
Triad I: Presence by Monica Valentinelli
Hal’s Story by Crystal Mazur
Dark Mirror by Elizabeth Petersen

Conspiracy of Shadows

Danel’s Blood by Mike Holmes
Sacrifice Part V by Monica Valentinelli
Sacrifice Part IV by Monica Valentinelli
Sacrifice Part III by Monica Valentinelli
Sacrifice Part II by Monica Valentinelli
Sacrifice Part I by Monica Valentinelli

a|state

Hunt by Greg Saunders

Cursed Empire:

The Settlement by Monica Valentinelli

Lacuna Part I

The Shark by Jared Sorensen

Related posts:

1. Horror Reviews on Flames Rising
2. Interviews on Flames Rising
3. Monster Madness Month at Flames Rising!

Tad Williams’ new short story collection, A Stark And Wormy Knight, is available now, worldwide, as an ebook, $4.99 (or equivalent) for one month. The following story is published on FlamesRising.com with express permission of the author. Happy Holidays!

THE SUGARPLUM FAVOR (A Christmas Story)

Written by Tad Williams

Danny Mendoza counted his change three times in while the teacher talked about what they were all supposed to bring for the class winter holiday party tomorrow. It was really a Christmas party, at least in Danny’s class, because that’s what all the kids’ families’ celebrated. Danny had his party contribution covered. He had volunteered to bring napkins and paper plates and cups because his family had some left over from his little brother’s birthday party with characters from Gabba Gabba Hey on them. He’d get teased about that, he knew, but he didn’t want to ask his mother to make something because she was so busy with his little brothers and the baby, and now that Danny’s stepfather Luis had lost his job they had a Money Situation. Danny could live with a little teasing.

Danny was going to buy a candy bar for his mother, one of those big ones. That was going to be his Christmas present to her and Danny knew how much she’d like it — he hadn’t just inherited his small size and nimble fingers from her, he’d got her sweet tooth, too. And she had just been talking about the Christmas a few years ago when Luis had a good job with the Sanitation Department and he’d brought her a whole box of See’s chocolates. Danny knew he couldn’t match that, but the last of the money he’d saved up from raking leaves in the neighborhood and walking old Mrs. Rosales’ wheezy little dog should be enough to buy a big old Hershey bar that would make Mama smile. No, what to get wasn’t a problem. The thing that had him thinking so hard as he went down the street at a hurried walk, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets, was whether he dared to get it now or should wait another day.

In Danny’s San Jose neighborhood the Mercado Estrella was like an African water hole, not only a crucial source of nurture but also the haunt of the most fearsome predator in his 3rd grade world. Any stop at the little market meant he risked running into Hector Villaba, the big, mean fifth-grade kid who haunted Danny’s days and often his nights as well. Danny couldn’t even begin to guess how much candy and other goodies Hector had stolen from him and the other kids over the years, but it was a lot — Hector was the elementary school’s Public Enemy Number One. About half the time his victims got shoved around, too, or even hit, and none of the grown-ups ever did anything about it except to tell their humiliated sons they should learn how to fight back. That was probably because Hector Villaba’s father was a violent, drunken brute who didn’t care what Hector did and everyone in the neighborhood was as scared of him as the kids at school were scared of his son. The last time someone in the neighborhood had called the police on Hector’s dad, all their windows had been broken while they were at church and their car scratched from one end to another.

Danny was still trying to make up his mind whether to risk stopping at the market today or wait for better odds tomorrow (when class ended early because of the holiday) when he saw Mrs. Rosales walking Pinto, her little spotted dog. He almost crossed the street because he knew she’d want to talk to him and he’d spent a lot of time doing that already last week when went to her house to get Pinto nearly every day. He was too close, though, she’d seen him, and Jesus hated being rude to old people almost as much as he hated it when kids lied, or at least that was what his mama always told him. Danny wasn’t expecting much from Santa anyway, but if Jesus got upset things would probably be even worse. He sighed and continued toward her.

“Look who’s here!” Mrs. Rosales said when she saw him. “Look, Pinto mi querida, it’s your friend Danny!” But when he waved and would have passed by she told him, “Hold on a moment, young man, I want to talk to you.”

He stopped, but he was really worried that Hector and his friends might catch up if he stood around too long. “Yes, Mrs. Rosales?”

“I short-changed you the other day.” She took out a little coin purse. It took her a long time to get it open with her knobby old fingers. “I owe you a dollar.”

“Really?” Danny was astonished.

She pulled out a piece of paper that looked like it had been folded and unfolded a hundred times and handed it to him. “I know boys need money this time of year!”

He thanked her, petted Pinto (who growled despite all their time together, because Pinto was a spoiled brat) and hurried toward the market. Another dollar! It was like one of those Christmas miracles on a television show – like the Grinch’s heart growing so much it made the x-ray machine go sproing! This changed everything. He could not only buy his mom’s present, he could buy something for himself, too. He briefly considered blowing the whole dollar on a Butterfinger, his very favorite, but he knew hard candies would be a better investment — he could share them with his younger brothers, and it was Christmas-time, after all. But whatever he got, he didn’t want to wait for tomorrow, not now that he had something to spend on himself. Danny Mendoza had been candy-starved for days. Nothing sweeter than the baby’s butterscotch pudding had passed his lips that week, and the pudding hadn’t been by his own choice. (His baby sister had discovered that if she waved her spoon things flew and splattered, and she liked that new trick a lot.) If he hurried to the market he should still get there long before Hector and his friends, who had many children to harass and humiliate on their way home. It was a risk, of course, but with an unexpected dollar in his pocket Danny felt strangely confident. There had to be such a thing as Christmas luck, didn’t there? After all, it was a whole holiday about Jesus getting born, and Jesus was kind to everybody. Although it sure hadn’t seemed like a lucky Christmas when Luis, Danny’s stepfather, had lost his job in the first week of December. But maybe things were going to get better now — maybe, as his mama sometimes said, the Mendoza family’s luck was going to change.

He was even more willing to believe in miracles when he saw no sign of Hector and his friends at the market. As he walked in Christmas music was playing loudly on the radio, that “Joy to the World” song sung by some smooth television star. Tia Marisol, the little old lady who ran the place on her own since her husband died, was trying to hang some lights above the cigarettes behind the cash register. She wasn’t his real aunt, of course. Everybody in the neighbohood just called her “Tia.”

“Oye, little man,” she called when she turned around and saw him. “How’s your mama?”

“Fine, Tia Marisol. I’m getting her a present.” He made his way past the postres to the long candy rack. So many colors, so many kinds! It almost seemed to glow, like in one of those cartoons where children found a treasure-cave. When Danny was little, it was what he had imagined when the minister at the church talked about Heaven. The only better thing he had ever seen in his whole life was the huge piñata at one of his school friends’ birthday party, years and years ago. When the birthday boy knocked the piñata open and candy came showering out and all the kids could jump in and take what they want – that had been amazing. Like winning a game show on television. Danny still dreamed about it sometimes.

Danny realized that he was staring like a dummy at the rack of candy when every second the danger that Hector and his friends would arrive kept growing. He quickly examined the big Hershey bars until he found one with a perfect wrapper, a massive candy bar that looked as if it had been made special for a commercial. He would have loved to spend more time browsing — how often did he have a whole dollar to spend just on candy? — but he knew time was short, so he grabbed a good-sized handful of hard, sour candies for sucking, took several different colors of candy ropes; then, as worry grew inside him, as uncomfortable as needing to pee, he finally snatched up a handful of bubble gum and ran to the front counter.

“What’s your hurry, m’hijo?” Tia Marisol asked.

“Mom needs me,” he said, which he hoped was not enough of a lie to ruin Jesus’ upcoming celebration. After all, Mom did always need his help, especially by this time in the day when she’d been on her own with the baby and the littlest brother since morning, and had just walked the other brother home from preschool. He pulled the three dollars worth of much-counted change out of one pocket and mounded it in front of Tia Marisol, then put the Hershey bar and his own handful of candy down beside it before digging out the crumpled dollar Mrs. Rosales had given him. She slid her glasses a little way down her nose while she looked at it all.

“Where’d you get so much money, Danny?”

“Raking lawns. Taking Mrs. Rosales dog for walks.”

Tia Marisol smiled, handed him back twenty-three cents, and put everything into a paper bag. “You’re a good boy. You and your family have a happy Christmas. Tell your mama I said hello, would you?”

“Sure.” He was already halfway through the door, heart beating.

The Christmas miracle continued outside: other than a couple of young mothers with strollers and bundled-up babies, and the old men who sat on the bus bench across the street drinking from bottles in paper bags, the area around the store was still clear. Danny began to walk toward home as fast as he could without running, because he had the bag under his coat now and he didn’t want to melt Mama’s candy bar. Still, he was almost skipping, he was so happy. Joy to the world, the Lord is come…!

“Hey, Mendoza,” someone shouted in a hoarse voice. “What’s in the bag, maricon?”

Danny stopped, frozen for a moment like a cornered animal, but then he began to walk again, faster and faster until he was running. There was no question whose voice that was. Pretty much every kid in his school knew it and feared it.

“Hold up, Mendoza, or I’ll kick your ass good!” The voice was getting closer. He could hear the whir of bike tires on the sidewalk coming up behind him fast. He looked back and saw that Hector Villaba and his big, stupid friends Rojo and Chuy were bearing down on him on their bikes, and in another second or two would ride him down. He lunged to the side just as Hector stuck out his foot and shoved him, sending Danny crashing into the low wire fence of the house he was passing. He bounced off and tumbled painfully to the sidewalk as Hector and his gang stopped just a few yards ahead, now blocking the sidewalk that led Danny home. The hard candies had fallen out of his bag and were scattered across the sidewalk. He got down on his knees, hurrying to pick them up, doing everything he could to avoid eye contact with Hector and the others, but when he reached for the last one Hector’s big, stupid basketball-shoe was on top of it. The older boy leaned over and picked it up. “Jolly Rancher, huh? Not bad. Not great, but not bad.” He waved it in Danny’s face, making him look up from all fours like a dog at its master. “I asked you what’s in the bag, Mendoza?”

“Nothing! It’s for my mama.”

“For your mama? Oh, iddn’t dat sweet?” Hector’s fingers hooked under Danny’s chin and lifted. Danny didn’t fight — he knew it wasn’t going to help — but he still flinched when he saw Hector’s round, sweaty face so close, the angry, pale yellow-brown eyes. Hector Villaba even had the beginnings of a real mustache, a hairy smudge on his upper lip. It was one of the things that made him so scary, one of the reasons why even bigger twelve year olds like Chuy and Rojo let him lead them — a fifth-grader with a mustache!

“C’mon, open it up,” Hector told him. “Let’s see what you got for your mama.” When Danny still didn’t offer up the bag, Hector’s friend Chuy put a foot on Danny’s back and pushed down so hard that Danny had to brace himself to keep from being shoved against the sidewalk. “I said show me, maricon,” said Hector. “Chuy gonna break your spine. He knows karate.”

Danny handed Hector the bag, biting his lip, determined not to cry. Hector pulled out the big Hershey Bar. “Hijole!” he said. “Look at that! Something for your mama, shit — you were going to eat that all by yourself. Not even share none with us. That’s cold, man.”

“It is for my mother! It is!” Danny pushed up against Chuy’s heavy hiking boot trying to reach the candy bar, which didn’t look anywhere near so huge clamped in Hector Villaba’s plump, dirty fingers. Chuy took his weight off for a moment, then kicked Danny in the ribs hard enough to make him drop to the concrete and hug himself in pain.

“If you try any more shit, we’ll hurt you good,” said Hector, laughing as he unwrapped the candy bar. He tossed a piece to Chuy, then another to Rojo, who grabbed it out of the air and shoved it in his mouth like a starving dog, then licked his fingers. Hector leaned down and gave Danny another shove, hard enough to crash him against the fence again. “Don’t you ever try to hide anything from me. I know where you live, dude. I’ll come over and slap the bitch out of you and your mama both.” He pointed to the hard candies still clutched in Danny’s hands. “Get that other shit, too, yo,” Hector told Rojo, and the big, freckled kid bent Danny’s fingers back until he surrendered it all.

The Christmas chocolate bar, looking sad and naked with half its foil peeled away, was still clutched in Hector’s hand as he and his friends rode away laughing, sharing the hard candy out of the bag.

For a while Danny just sat on the cold sidewalk and wished he had a knife or even a gun and he could kill Hector Villaba, even if it made Jesus unhappy for weeks. At that moment Danny almost felt like he could do it. The rotten, mean bastard had taken his mom’s present!

At last Danny wiped his eyes and continued home. It was starting to get dark and the wind was suddenly cold, which made his scratched-up hands ache. When he reached the apartment he let himself in, dropped his book bag by the door, then called a greeting to his mama feeding Danny’s baby sister in the kitchen as he hurried on to the bathroom so he could clean up his scratches and tear-stained face and do his best to hide the damage to the knees of his pants before she saw him up close. It wouldn’t do any good to tell her what had happened – she couldn’t do anything and it would make her very sad. Danny was used to keeping quiet about what went on between home and school, school and home.

After a while he went out and sat at the table and watched as his mother fed green goop to the baby. Even her smile for Danny looked tired. Mama worked so hard to keep them all fed and dressed, hardly ever yelled, and even sang old songs from Mexico for Danny and his brothers when she wasn’t too tired…
And now that cabron Hector had stolen her present, and he didn’t have any money left to get her something else.

Later that night, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, Danny found himself crying again. It was so unfair! What had happened to the Christmas luck? Or did that kind of thing only happen to other kids, other families?

“Please, Jesus,” he prayed quietly. “I just have to get Mama something for Christmas – something Hector can’t take. If that’s a miracle, okay – I mean, I know you can’t do them all the time, but if you got one…an extra one…”

Something woke him up – a strange noise in the living room. For a moment he lay in bed wondering if Santa Claus might have come, but then he remembered it was still three days until Christmas. Still, he could definitely hear something moving, a kind of quiet fluttery sound. His brothers were both sprawled in boneless, little-boy sleep across the mattress they shared, so he climbed carefully over them and made his way out to the living room. At first he saw nothing more unusual than the small Christmas tree on top of the coffee table, but as he stared, his eyes trying to get used to the dark, he saw the tree was…moving? Yes, moving, the top of the pine wagging like a dog’s tail.

Danny had never heard of a Christmas tree coming to life, not even in a TV movie, and it scared him. He picked up the tennis racket with the missing strings Luis kept promising to fix, then crawled toward the scraggly tree with its ornaments of foil and cut paper.

As he got closer he could see that something small was caught in the tree’s topmost branch, trying to fly away but not succeeding. He could hear its wings beating so fast they almost buzzed. A bird, trapped in the apartment? A really big moth?

Danny looked for one of the baby’s bowls to trap it, then had a better idea and crept to the kitchen cabinet where his mom kept the washed jars. He picked a big one that had held sandwich spread and slithered commando-style back to the living room. Whatever the thing was, it was really stuck, tugging and thrashing as it tried to free itself from the pine needles. He dropped the jar over it and pulled carefully on the branch until the thing could finally get free, then Danny clapped the lid on the jar to keep it from escaping.

The thing inside the jar went crazy now, flying against the glass, the wings going so fast that it made it hard for him to see for certain what it was. The strange thing was, it actually looked like a person — a tiny, tiny little person no bigger than a sparrow. That was crazy. Danny knew it was crazy. He knew he had to be dreaming.

“What are you doing?” the thing said in a tiny, rasping voice. It didn’t sound happy at all. “Let me go!”

Danny was so startled to hear it talk that he nearly dropped the jar. He held it up to the light coming in from the street lamp to get a better look. The prisoner in the jar was a little lady — a lady with wings! A real, honest-to-goodness Christmas miracle! “Are you…an angel?” he asked.

“Let me out, young man, and we’ll talk about it.” She didn’t sound much like an angel. Actually, she sounded a lot like that scratchy-voiced nanny on that TV show his mama watched sometimes. Her hair was yellow and kind of wild and sticky-uppy, and she wore a funny little dancing dress. She was also carrying a bag over her shoulder like Santa did, except that hers wasn’t much bigger than Danny’s thumb .

“P-Promise you won’t fly away?” he asked this strange small person. “If I let you out?”

She had her tiny hands pressed up against the inside of the jar. She shook her head so hard her little sparkly crown almost fell off. “Promise. But hurry up — I don’t like enclosed places. Honest, it makes me want to scream. Let me out, please.”

“Okay. But no cheating.” He unscrewed the lid on the jar and slowly turned it over. The tiny lady rose up, fluttering into the light that streamed through the living room window.

“Oh, that’s so much better,” she said. “I got stuck in a panoramic Easter egg once, wedged between a frosting bunny and a cardboard flower pot. Thought I was going to lose my mind.”

“Wow,” he said. “Who are you? What are you?”

She carefully landed on the floor near his knee. “I’m a sugarplum fairy,” she said. “Like in that ballet.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Look, thanks for getting me loose from that tree.” She turned herself around trying to look down at herself. “Rats! Ripped my skirt. I hate conifers.” She turned back to Danny. “I didn’t mean to scare you, I was just passing through the neighborhood when I felt somebody thinking candy thoughts — real serious candy thoughts. I mean, it was like someone shouting. Anyway, that’s what we do, us sugarplum fairies — we handle the candy action, especially at Christmas time. So I thought I should come and check it out. Was it you? Because if it was, you’ve got the fever bad, kid.” She reached into her bag and produced a lollypop bigger than she was, something that couldn’t possibly have fit in there. “Here, have one on me. You look like you need it.”

“Wow. Wow!” He suddenly realized he was talking out loud and dropped his voice, worried that he would wake up his mama and Luis. He reached out for the lollypop. “You’re really a fairy. Do you know Jesus?”

She shrugged. “I think he’s in another department. What’s your name? It’s Danny, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yeah.” It suddenly struck him. “You know my name…?”

“I’ve got it all written down somewhere.” She started riffling through her bag again, then pulled out something that looked like a tiny phone book. She took out an equally small pair of glasses, opened the book and began reading. “For some reason you fell off the list here, Danny. No wonder you’re so desperate — you haven’t had a sugarplum delivery in quite a while! Well, that at least I can do something about.” She frowned as she took a pen out of the apparently bottomless bag and made a correction. “Of course, they may not process the new order until early next year, and I’m not scheduled back in this area until Valentines Day.” She frowned. “Doesn’t seem fair…” A moment later her tiny face brightened. “Hey, since you saved me from that tree branch I think I’m allowed to give you a wish. Would you like that?”

“Really? A wish?”

“Yes. I can do that.”

“You’ll give me a wish? Like magic? A wish?”

She frowned again. “Come on, kid, I know you’ve been shorted on candy the last couple of years but is your blood sugar really that low? I just very clearly said I will give you a wish. We’re allowed to when someone helps us out.”

He was so excited he could barely sit still. It was a Christmas miracle after all, a real one! “Could I wish for, like, a million dollars?” Then even if Luis didn’t find another job for a while, the family would be okay. More than okay.

She shook her head. “Sorry, kid, no. I only do candy-related wishes. You want one of those extra big gummy bears? I hear those are popular this year. I could bend some rules and get it to you by Christmas.”

He was tempted — he’d seen an ad on television — but now it was his turn to shake his head. “Could I just get a big Hershey bar? One of those extra-big ones? For my mother?”

The little woman tilted her head up so she could see him better from where she stood down on the ground. “Truly? Is that all you want? Gee, kid, I could feel the desperation coming off this house like weird off an elf. You sure you don’t want something a little more…substantial? A pile of candy, maybe? A year’s supply of gumdrops or something? As long as it’s candy-related, I can probably get it done for you, but you better decide quick.” She pulled quite a large pocket watch on a chain out of her bag, then put on her glasses again. “After midnight, and I’ve still got half my rounds to go.” She looked up at him. “You seem like a nice kid, Danny, and it doesn’t look like you guys are exactly swimming in presents and stuff. How about a nice pile of candy, assorted types? Or if you’d rather just concentrate on — what did you say, Hershey Bars? — I could probably arrange a shopping bag of those or something…”

For a moment his head swam at the prospect of a grocery bag full of giant chocolate bars, more than Hector the Butt-head Villaba could ever dream of having now matter how much he stole…but then another idea came floating up from deep down in Danny’s thoughts – a strange, dark idea.

“Can you do all kinds of wishes? Really all kinds?”

“Yeah, but just one. And it definitely has to be candy-related. I’m not a miracle worker or anything.”

“Okay. Then I’ll tell you what I want.” Danny could suddenly see it all in his imagination, and it was very, very good.

The school holiday party was nice. Danny and his classmates played games and sang songs and had a snack of fruit and cheese and crackers. Nobody brought Chips Ahoy cookies, but one of the mothers did indeed bring cupcakes, delicious chocolate ones with silver, green and red sprinkles for Christmas. There were even enough left over that although Danny had finished his long ago despite making it last as long as possible, he was allowed to take home the last two for his little brothers. He suspected that the teacher knew his family didn’t have much money, but for this one day it didn’t embarrass him at all.

After the bell rang Danny followed the other third-graders toward the school gate, holding one cupcake carefully in each hand, his book bag draped over his shoulder. He was watching his feet so carefully that he didn’t see what made the other children suddenly scatter to either side, but as soon as he heard the voice he knew the reason.

“Look at that, it’s Maricon Mendoza, yo,” said Hector Villaba. “What’d you bring us for Christmas, kid?” Danny looked up. The mustached monster was sitting astride his bike just a few yards down the sidewalk, flanked by Rojo and Chuy. “Oh, yeah, dude — cupcakes!” said Hector. “You remembered our Christmas presents.” He scooted his bike forward until he stood directly over Danny, then reached out for the cupcakes. Danny couldn’t help it — he jerked back when Hector tried to take them, even though he knew it would probably earn him another bruising.

“Punch the little chulo’s face in,” Rojo suggested.

Hector dropped his bike with a clatter. The other kids from school who had stopped to stare in horrified fascination jumped out of his way as he strode forward and grabbed the cupcakes out of Danny’s hands. He peeled the paper off one and shoved the whole cupcake in his mouth, then tossed the other to Chuy. “You two split that,” he said through a mouthful of devil’s food, then turned his attention back to Danny, who was so scared and excited that he felt like electricity was running through him. “Next time, you better remember to bring one for each of us, Mendoza. You only bring two, that’s going to get your ass kicked.”

Danny backed away. It was hard to look into those yellow-brown eyes and not run crying, let alone keep thinking clearly, but Danny did his best. He dropped his book bag to the ground and out fell the stringless tennis racket that he had brought from home. Hector hooted with angry laughter as Danny snatched it up and held it before him as if it was a cross and Hector was a vampire.

“Que? You going to try to hit me, little boy?” Hector laughed again, but he didn’t sound happy. He didn’t like it when people stood up to him. “I’ll take that away from you and beat your ass black and blue, Mendoza.” The bully took a step nearer and held out his hand. “Give it to me or I’ll break your fingers.”

“No.” Danny wasn’t going to step back any farther. He lifted the racket, waved it around like a baseball bat. It was old and flimsy, but he had come to school determined today. “You can’t have it…you fat asshole.”

Behind Hector, Rojo let out a surprised chortle, but Hector Villaba didn’t think it was funny at all.

“That’s it,” he said, curling his hands into fists. “After I kick your ass, I’m gonna rub your face in dog shit. Then I’m gonna kick your ass again. You’re gonna spend Christmas in the hospital.” Without warning, he charged toward Danny.

Danny stepped to the side and swung the racket as hard as he could, hitting Hector right in the stomach. With a whoop of surprise and pain Hector bent double, but when he looked up he didn’t look hurt, just really, really mad, his eyes staring like a crazy dog’s eyes.

“That’s…it. I’m…going…to…get…you…Mendoza…” he said, then sucked in air and stood up straight, but even as he did so a funny expression crossed his face and he looked down at where he was holding his belly. Hector’s hands were suddenly full of crackling, cellophane-wrapped hard candies, so many of them that they cascaded over his fingers and onto the ground. He lifted his hands in disbelief to look and dozens more of the candies slid out of the front of his open jacket — candy bars, too, fun-size and even regular ones, Snickers bars, Mounds, Tootsie Rolls, lollipops, candy canes, even spicy tamarindos. The other children from the school stared in horrified fascination, guessing that Danny had broken a bag that Hector had been carrying under his coat. They were so scared of Hector that they didn’t move an inch toward any of the candy that was still slithering out of the big boy’s coat and pooling on the ground at his feet.

“Oh, man,” one of the other third graders said in a hoarse whisper, “Mendoza’s going to get beat up so bad…!”

But even more candy was pouring out of Hector’s belly now, as if someone had turned on a candy-faucet, a great river of sweets running out of the place where Danny had knocked him open with his old tennis racket.

“What the…?” Then Hector Villaba looked down at himself and began to scream in terror. Candy was showering out of him faster and faster onto the sidewalk, already piled as high as the cuffs of his pants and still coming.

“Hijole, dude!” said Rojo. “You’re a piñata!”

Hector looked at him, eyes rolling with fear, then he turned sprinted away down the street squealing like a kindergartner, a flood of candy still pouring from him, Crunch Bars, M&Ms, (plain and peanut) as well as boxes of gumdrops and wax-wrapped pieces of taffy, all raining onto the street around the bully’s legs and feet, bouncing and rolling.

Rojo and Chuy watched Hector run for a moment, then turned to stare at Danny with a mixture of apprehension and confusion. Then turned from him to look at each other, came to some kind of agreement, and threw themselves down on their knees to start scooping up the candy that had fallen out of Hector Villaba. Within a few seconds the other school kids were all scrambling across the ground beside them, everybody shoveling candy into their pockets as fast as they could.

Danny waited until he wasn’t breathing so hard, then started for home, following the clear trail of candy that had gushed from Hector Villaba as he ran. He didn’t bother to pick up everything, since for once in his life he could afford to be selective. He stuffed one pocket of his jacket with candy for his brothers, then filled the other just with Butterfinger Bars, at least six or seven, but kept walking with his head down until he spotted a nice, big Hershey Bar in good condition which he zipped in his book bag so it would stay safe for his mother. The rest of the way home he picked up whatever looked interesting and threw it into the book bag too, until by the time he reached home he was staggering with its weight up the apartment building walkway. For once, Hector Villaba had been the one who had run home crying.

He didn’t feel sorry for Hector, either, not at all. Scared as the fifth-grader was now, he would be all right when he reached home. Danny had made that a part of the wish and the fairy had said she thought it was a good idea. Jesus didn’t want even mean kids to die from having their guts really fall out, Danny felt pretty sure, so he had done his best not to spoil the Lord’s birthday. Of course Hector Villaba probably wouldn’t have a very merry Christmas, but Danny had decided that Jesus could probably live with that.

A Stark And Wormy Knight is available now on the Amazon Kindle.

Tad Williams – 2011

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1. Review of Shadowheart by Tad Williams
2. Preview of Shadowrise by Tad Williams
3. Interview with Fantasy Author Tad Williams

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.

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1. Night Veil Review
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3. Vampire Week: Night Myst Review

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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2. Cthulhu Week: Cthulhu’s Reign Anthology Review

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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3. The Crimson Pact Anthology Preview

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.”

Related posts:

1. Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly eBook Available Now!
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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2. Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly eBook Available Now!
3. Delta Green: Two Tickets, Please

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.

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. Here’s a glimpse.

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

Part One: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even also as I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” —I Corinthians ch. 13, v.1

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” —William Blake

“In The Fugue”
At the Focus.

It wasn’t a dream.

He was watching himself from above, but not in some abstract sense. He saw himself from a height of a dozen meters or more, cowering amid low-standing ferns with his M-16 forgotten at his feet, dressed in ridiculously oversized fatigues stained with red mud. Others were there, but they were lost in their own terror. Somehow, though he knew them, he couldn’t place them. They weren’t what drew his attention. He was looking at something which split the night like a magnesium flare. His face—younger than he recalled—was agape, considering what his mind wouldn’t bring into focus. He looked terrified, seconds from death.

But that was not the only self he saw. He also stood in a stark hospital room, older now, covering his face with a hand that clutched a pistol, trying to shield his eyes. The shift from the first scene to the second was as simple as tilting one’s head. In one corner of his vision he saw the jungle, in the other the hospital room. They were seamlessly connected. That same light played across the room, engulfing it, obscuring what was in the bed. A low hum pulsed like a rocketing freight train on a collision course with his mind, shaking everything like it would tear the world to pieces.

Even as he looked away, there was more hims, more selves. Now he stood, older still, in a long, thin, tall hallway hung with timber rafters, and the same light spilled over him. The door at the end of the unfinished hall was open and filled with light. The sound was worse, but also fascinating—beautiful and haunting, like a lullaby recalled only by biological memory; something from far too early in life to recall properly, but which hung over a lifetime like unconscious knowledge.

He turned away and found himself face-to-face with himself—terrified, lost, lit by the blue-white light. Then he was himself, his other self, facing the light. Fearing to look too closely into the light, he turned again. Then again, quicker, and again. Soon the room was spinning in lazy flips, as he leapt from self to self through time. Looping. Closing the loop. Faster.

The music built to a crescendo as he found he could no longer look away from the light. The jumps were so fast now that his vision of the light was a staccato blast of a dozen different wiggling frames per second. There were shapes there in the light. The sounds and the shapes formed patterns. The patterns were everything. When his eyes tracked each pattern and each sound, the world froze. Each mote of existence hung in the air like a lazy snowflake, apparent, clear, perfect. Still.

When he woke with a startled jump at a sound from the room, he considered his shaking hands, and then slowly strapped on his pistol. Someday, he was certain, he would need it.

“The Call”
Collateral paranormal event: Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. 40.48 N/74.46 W latitude/longitude: Saturday, January 22, 2001, 4:37 A.M. EST

When the call came, Brady Commons was lit in dark, pastel tones. The quad was empty, lit here and there by arc lamps and an amber sky that was gaining a clear, still light—the type that would cook off the fog before dawn ever came. It was not morning, at least not yet; there were hours left until the students would rise and go about their business.

Now was the time of empty hallways. Of flickering fluorescent lamps and the soothing hum and click of unattended soda machines, of the pulsing rhythms of the boiler in the bowels of the building, chugging away like a buried beast. It was a time rich with the energy that moves in the air when no one is around, the sensation of events perched on the edge of occurring, the feeling of tension gathering silently in the air like a storm—the force of a spring compressing in a mechanism ready to trigger a countdown.

When the phone rang at four thirty-seven in the morning in room 3A, it rang only once. Usually a phone at this time of the morning would ring on and on while someone stumbled through the dark to find out who had died. It was always bad news at a time like this. In a way, this call was no different. The news was bad, though the caller and man who answered would not realize how bad until much, much later.

The person next to this particular phone had been sleeping on the floor in front of the television set, with a single meaty arm on the shelf next to the receiver and his head propped up on the edge of the couch, since two thirty-four. His jerky rise to consciousness, all elbows and knees, knocked the receiver off the hook before it could ring again. Lost in a sea of fast-food cartons and half-eaten Doritos bags, the man looked like a casualty in the war on obesity. His Rutgers T-shirt, stained with various sauces and beverages, had not seen detergent in more than a year.

He rose to a soupy semi-consciousness and jiggled as he coughed and rubbed his pimpled face. The receiver chattered away on the table; a disembodied chipmunk-like voice poured from the earpiece. The man tried to press down his hair, stuck up in loose brown cowlicks held together by spit, sleep and drying food, but it immediately returned to its former state of chaos.

The fat man fumbled for the receiver on the table, which slipped away from his grasp like a fish and dropped to the nappy burgundy rug at his hip. Then, somehow he managed to scoop the ugly handset up in both hands. He didn’t open his eyes. The room was dark except for the television flashing an endless, snow-like static. He connected the right end of the phone to his right ear. The chipmunk voice was still babbling away on the other end.

“Garrity . . . hmch . . . Garrity here,” the fat man said, finally.

The voice on the line, which had been talking the whole time, paused for a second to emit a stuttering sound of disgust, then continued in a higher, more urgent tone.

“Shut up! Garrity, shut up. Bob Lumsden broke Violet 5. He’s gone. I don’t know what happened. He’s gone. Did I say that? It worked. The program worked. I’ll be fucked if it didn’t work. It worked. He’s gone. It worked. What did we do, Garrity? What the fuck—Garrity? Are you there?”

“Garrity here,” the fat man replied, nonplussed. Nothing had registered. It was all gibberish. The only thing he recognized was his name.

“What the fuck do we do?”

“I come down and see what happened,” he said.

“What?”

“I–COME–DOWN–TO–THE–LAB!” Garrity shouted, his voice tired and hoarse.

“But did you hear me? He’s fuckin’ gone! Lumsden’s gone!”

“Where’d he go?” Garrity yawned.

“He disappeared in front of me and Loew, in the machine. Loew’s curled in the corner like some sort of—I don’t know. Shit.”

Garrity stood up in the dark, pulling the phone’s base off the table. It hit the ground and made an angry ringing noise that slowly echoed into silence.

“Was it on? Was the Glass active?”

“WEREN’T YOU FUCKING LISTENING HE BROKE VIOLET 5!”

“Keep it down, Mitchell, no one’s ever broken Violet 5,” Garrity whispered.

“My program worked. We sidestepped the error. It worked.”

“Worked,” Garrity echoed, his voice empty of all emotion.

Something dark and empty settled in Garrity’s stomach. It took more than a minute to realize that for all his breakthroughs and inventions and knowledge, an unreasoning fear held him frozen. Waiting for more information. Three miles away on the other end of the line, Mitchell breathed into the phone but remained silent. Beneath the breathing, Garrity heard a static-filled chorus of voices, mistransmissions that bled through on the line.

Garrity hung up the phone and stared at the static-covered television. After a moment, he clicked it off with the remote.

“Violet 5,” he said to no one at all. And then began to dress in the dark, retrieving his shoes and pants from a pile of clothing under the table that held the television.

He didn’t know what to feel, but one thing seemed obvious: Either he had lost his mind or Mitchell had. (Or maybe, his analytical mind chimed in, they had lost their minds simultaneously.) Other options were there, of course. Other possibilities—but they were difficult to think about.

People did not disappear. Loew, ever stable, did not break down. There were general rules to the universe. Doritos made you fat. The television played static after four if you didn’t have cable. There were stars in the sky.

But he had read so much to the contrary, so much that he had put into the construction of the Looking-Glass.

The world doesn’t really make sense, does it, he thought. It never has, and you’ve always known it, everyone knows it. Some choose to ignore that feeling, some—

With effort he pushed the thoughts away. He had been entertaining them, the same thoughts that led to his career and construction of the Looking-Glass, since before he could remember. They had always been there.

Please let me believe that Lumsden’s just playing a joke, he silently pleaded as he pulled out of the parking lot in his clunky Daihatsu.

But he didn’t believe. They weren’t friends and he knew it. They were geniuses who tolerated each other so they would have someone to prove wrong and to get done what needed to get done. What Mitchell said happened, had happened. He knew it. But what if it was all a mistake?

Something wouldn’t let him find comfort in that simple thought.

“Please God, let me believe in something,” he said aloud in the car. His voice sounded so hollow, so tinny in the stutter of the sewing-machine engine that he found no solace in the muttered prayer.

The first and last sincere prayer he would utter in his adult life.

Related posts:

1. Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly eBook Available Now!
2. Delta Green: Two Tickets, Please
3. Preview of Delta Green: Intelligences

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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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.

Related posts:

1. Preview of The Zombie Feed Volume One Anthology
2. An Agreement with Hell Preview

Flames Rising is pleased to present Black Angels, a story by Michael Jasper, which is part of the Gunning for the Buddha anthology. Gunning for the Buddha is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

Author Michael Jasper has this to say about Black Angels:

“Black Angels” started with a picture and a memory, of a statue in an Iowa City graveyard. The rest came to me as I was daydreaming on my commute home from work one day. The statue from the story really does exist, in an Iowa City cemetery. Every freshman learns about it while attending the University of Iowa. The Black Angel is spooky. Especially at night…

Black Angels by Michael Jasper

In an abandoned graveyard on the outskirts of a small Midwestern city, on his ninety-seventh birthday, a slender man stood in front of a slab of concrete and wished for death.

He pulled the hood of his gray coat tighter around his head, hiding his unlined face. Tomorrow the workers would tear out the slab, all that remained of the obsolete cemetery. He stood in front of the statue’s base as the sun turned the cloudy sky red, then purple. All too well he knew the legends surrounding the statue that had once rested on this slab, but that had not kept him from returning for a final visit to the Black Angel.

In the center of the block of cracked concrete, three inches of blackened copper remained, in the shape of bare feet. There, on the outside of what had once been the left foot of the statue, were three tiny white marks. Fingerprints.

The ninety-seven-year-old man reached out and, for the second time in his life, he touched the Black Angel.

#

Tom Arneson was betting he could get Mercy to the cemetery by telling her the story of the Angel. And unlike his run of bad luck in the past two years, he was positive this bet would pay off for him.

“It came to Iowa City from France,” he said, his voice quivering from a mixture of excitement, nerves, and need. He handed Mercy a beer and stuffed three cans into his jacket. “Took a team of four horses to deliver it to Oakland Cemetery, back in 1911. And get this — the statue had started out white, but it turned black during its first Halloween in the cemetery.”

Mercy gave Tom a long look as she pulled on her leather jacket. Having met her only two days ago, Tom didn’t know her well enough to really understand what that look meant. And after tonight, he would never get another chance to learn its meaning.

“You want to go there,” Mercy said. It wasn’t a question. “Tonight.”

“You got it,” Tom grinned.

“I think I liked the metal-goth club you took me to last night better. Or do you always take girls to the graveyard on your second dates?”

“Ah, come on,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound like he was pleading. “It’ll be a blast,” he added.

They left his apartment and walked north. Tom finished one beer and started another, tossing the can onto a gravel driveway. Leaving campus behind, they walked past unlit houses and empty lots in the older part of town. A rusted-out Ford Escort puttered past, filling the air with the stink of burnt oil.

To keep Mercy from getting suspicious, and to keep himself from losing his nerve, Tom told stories about the Angel.

“Now, the base of the statue was supposedly cut from the same rock that they rolled from Jesus’ tomb Easter morning. And the Angel takes a flight every Christmas at midnight, returning before dawn — like Santa,” Tom added with a barking laugh.

“And you waited ‘til it was dark to show it to me?” A flash of anger showed in Mercy’s brown eyes like a hint of lightning. She shook her head, her curly blonde hair falling around her shoulders in a way that made Tom’s heart ache.

No, Tom thought, even as he leaned closer, inhaling Mercy’s smell of cloves and roses. I have to do this, repay my debts. Otherwise, I’m going down. Hard.

He hadn’t told Mercy about the Angel’s black eyes that would cry tears of rusted silver for lost souls, and most of all, the danger of touching the Angel if you were impure.

“Oxidation,” she said as they passed through the gate outside of Oakland Cemetery. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be smelling the crisp autumn air around them.

Tom closed the creaking gate with a wince. “Huh?”

“Copper oxidizes.” She opened her eyes and tapped on his chest, twice, and Tom felt like his heart had stopped. “That’s why the statue turned black.”

Tom looked at her as they walked down the path of uneven bricks embedded into the ground, passing blocks of grayish-white concrete on either side. Had she been able to see his eyes then, he knew he’d have his thoughts displayed in them like a neon sign. But his face was hidden by the darkness, and the Black Angel was just ahead of them.

#

A silver coin, almost hidden in the grass, sat right in front of Tom’s shoe, but he wasn’t looking down. He was looking up, at her, staring like a kid at wings he could barely make out against the night sky. He’d seen the statue before, of course, but she still stole the breath from his lungs. As he stared, he’d felt something drop in his gut, as if he’d just dropped ten floors in an elevator.

Falling.

The Angel was taller than a human, and on her slab of concrete she loomed over Tom and Mercy like a nightmare. Her bare right arm was held up as if to ward off a blow from above, while the other arm reached out parallel to the ground as if for balance. Lifted up to the sky, the Angel’s starkly beautiful face was streaked with lines of gray rust, like tears.

But the realistic details of her face, the implicit threat of that upraised arm, and the imposing height weren’t what gave Tom the shivers. It was the massive, seven-foot-long wings — one nearly touching the ground, the other spread to the side like a feathered awning — that made his mouth go dry.

Falling, his mind whispered again, then he shook himself out of his reverie, sloshing beer onto his arm. I have to do this.

When he looked down at his shoes to make sure he wasn’t dropping through the earth, he saw the coin. A silver shekel, to be exact. He’d looked it up on the Internet, and this was one. Tom picked up the coin with his free hand, touching with his thumb the coin’s upraised eagle perched on the prow of a ship. Just as promised.

Tom looked away from the coin to find Mercy staring at him.

“Tom,” she said. “Where did that come from?”

HE shrugged and slid the coin into his pocket. It was rough-edged and surprisingly heavy. It had to be genuine.

Mercy’s face dropped, as if in disappointment. Then an explosion rocked the night.

#

The explosion was unlike anything Tom Arneson had ever felt in his life. There was no sound, only the numbing blast of wrongness. The shock wave knocked the half-empty can of beer from his hand and burst the two beers inside his jacket.

Dripping and shuddering with cold, Tom grabbed Mercy and pulled her to the ground behind the statue, almost touching the statue above them in the process. Panicking, he probed his wet shirt. He wasn’t bleeding, just out of beer.

“What was that?” Mercy spoke directly into his ear. “Tom?”

He swallowed, trying to get his ears to pop. Something hot and wet trickled from his left ear.

Concussion, he thought. Fuck.

Another explosion shook him, and Mercy lifted herself halfway up behind the statue before Tom could stop her. A second later, she slid back down next to him, eyes wide.

“What is it?” Tom peeked around the statue.

Mercy answered by pointing toward the brick path leading to the Black Angel.

Tom’s first reaction was to check to make sure he still had the coin in his pocket. But he suppressed the urge and stared hard at the dead grass and white crosses around him. As he squinted, he wondered at the warmth of Mercy’s hand in his left hand. She wasn’t even shaking.

“There,” she said into his ear, her whisper like a scream as his ears finally popped. “Catch it in the corner of your eye.”

Following her gaze, Tom again saw nothing. He tried to smile, but just as he was about to say something about it, a third explosion knocked him off-balance.

Three? Tom felt true panic overtaking him. The agreement had been for only two. Not three.

His upper body drenched in Old Milwaukee, he was shaking with cold when he saw the shadow of a two-foot-tall headstone move. The shadow lifted up, unfolding like a man rising from a crouch. It grew legs. Arms. A head.

Another explosion lacerated his ears, then another and another. Before he could blink, his eyes became unfocused with fear. In that instant of unfocusing, Tom saw inside the blackness of the moving shadow in front of them. He saw narrowed black eyes, a greasy, dog-like nose, and sharp yellow teeth in the depths of the moving shadow. As he stared, two other shadows pulled themselves together and flanked the first.

This, Tom Arneson wanted to scream as Mercy wriggled out of his grasp, was definitely not part of the agreement.

#

The agreement had been simple: thirty pieces of silver in exchange for Mercy.

Tom hadn’t known anything about the silver coins before two o’clock a.m. the previous night, immediately after he’d gotten home from his first date with Mercy. Ears throbbing from the music of the night club they’d just left, head spinning from Mercy’s kisses, he didn’t know until he’d closed and locked the door behind him that he had a visitor.

Standing behind Tom’s second-hand chair in his combination living room and bedroom was a short, thin man in a dusty gray overcoat. The man held a battered leather pouch, shiny with use. Before Tom could do or say anything, the brown-skinned man opened the pouch. Tom’s voice died at the sight of the coins inside.

“You and I need to talk,” the man said. “Have a seat.”

Completely unnerved by the man’s presence, with the taste Mercy’s lipstick still clinging to his lips, Tom did as he was told. He heard himself offering the man, who smelled of hemp and cheap wine, a cold beer in exchange for another look at the silver coins. The man refused the drink.

“We’ve been looking for a sturdy young man like you,” the man said, fingering a purplish scar that wound its way around his thin neck. He wouldn’t sit down, but kept pacing around the piles of laundry, beer cans, and empty fast food bags of Tom’s apartment. “My people have found someone they need to contact, someone that you seem to know. Call me the middleman. Just like you, my boy. We can both profit from these circumstances.”

Tom was still staring at the thick coins in the pouch next to him on the end table, thinking of how much they had to be worth, aching to touch one of them. The man stopped pacing.

“We know of your new friend,” he said. “We’ve been looking for her for quite some time, though she proven to be quite elusive. In exchange for one simple task, the Nephilim and I are willing to pay you with the contents of this pouch. My employers would have come here themselves, but their movements are a bit limited, and they tend to make slightly, ah, shall we say, dramatic entrances.”

“Right,” Tom said. He was still staring at the coins. “What the hell are these things, anyway?”

“These are silver shekels, boy, made in the coastal city of Tyre, the only coins accepted at the Jerusalem Temple. In such pristine condition as these, one of these shekels would be enough to pay off your debts. And I’m offering you more than one.”

“Who told you about my debts?” Tom tried to stand up, but he felt a weight on his chest, keeping him in place.

“I have my sources,” the man said, rattling the coins in the pouch. “Mr. Valerio is getting quite impatient, by the way. His boys are quite big, and they never get to see much action these days. There was mention of broken limbs to help speed up the loan repayment process. Broken limbs, plus interest.”

Tom stared up at the man standing over him. Gazing into the man’s dark eyes was like falling into lightless tunnel.

“What do I have to do?” Tom said.

The man nodded. “I knew,” he said with a faint smile, “that I’d found a kindred spirit in you.”

#

In the cemetery, behind the Black Angel, Tom Arneson was counting backwards.

There had been six of the silent explosions. Six.

“Tom,” Mercy said in a calm, almost resigned tone of voice. “Who the hell have you been talking to?”

He glanced at Mercy, her long hair in her face as she huddled closer to the statue. She was beautiful in almost distracted way that Tom had immediately noticed when he walked into the off-campus tavern where she was tending bar. He’d never been to the tavern before, but all of the bars on campus had refused to let him come back until he’d taken care of his stack of unpaid bar bills, so he’d come to the Half-Dollar Tavern. With his last bit of money, he’d bought twenty scratch-and-win lottery tickets from Mercy, convinced he’d get a winner.

When he’d scratched off an entire set of losers, Mercy had smiled at him and poured him a beer, and they began talking. At the end of the night, when all three of his credit cards came up invalid, she shrugged and paid for him, then went home with him.

Now, two nights later, Mercy stood next to him with her face cast into shadow, her eyes hardened with some emotion Tom couldn’t decipher. Anger? Fear? Resignation?

Tom looked away, and the shadows caught his eye again.

Inside the first shadow glimmered a man-sized beast made up almost entirely of yellowed, sharpened teeth. The teeth lined the mouth, as might be expected, but they also rippled up and down its shadowy arms and chest and legs. They moved, opening and closing up and down the creature’s body, as if it were covered in hungry mouths. Tom squeezed his eyes shut.

I have to do this, he told himself, touching the cold coin in his pocket. I need to do this.

When he opened his eyes again, the two other shadows had spread out, with the first in the middle. They moved as one toward the statue of the Black Angel. Two more shadows coalesced on the other side of the brick path.

He forced his eyes open and reached for Mercy. Her breathing was shallow and forced.

“Tom,” she hissed. “How did they know we were here?”

Wiping a line of blood from his face, Tom searched the gravestones and walkway for the sixth creature. If they brought three times their promised number, that must have meant they wanted both him and Mercy. Or they were expecting some kind of fight. Maybe Mercy was more powerful than Tom could’ve imagined.

“How did they know we were here?” Tom said, responding to her at last, his eyes still unfocused. “They know because I–”

Before he could explain how he’d told the shadow creatures to meet them there on that night, his words were drowned out by a sizzling burst of light, like lightning that eradicated the darkness for a few seconds of daylight brightness.

“They came,” Mercy said, loud enough for Tom to hear her. “I don’t believe it. It worked.”

Tom slid down to the ground, deafened once again as well as blinded. He rested his head against the base of the statue.

I’m a dead man.

Moments later, after his eyes and ears recovered, he saw that the cemetery was filled with a white, strobing light, accompanied by the roar of battle from all sides. Mercy stood up next to him, only partially shielded by the Black Angel’s wing.

Tom pulled her down out of the combat zone. Even when she was next to him, her face remained dazed, with a slight grin. The battle paused as voices shouted from the flickering shadows around them. The newcomers must have seen Mercy and pulled back. Spinning dots of light glinted in the starless sky above them, as angry, gutteral words assaulted Tom’s aching ears.

“What is that?” Tom hissed. “Greek? German?”

“Latin.” When she finally looked at him, her eyes were red-rimmed, on fire. “Surely you know Latin, don’t you, Tom?”

Above them, five figures of light dropped from the sky, followed by a sixth and seventh. While the shadows had pulled together to form the creatures made up of teeth, the creatures of white energy hovering above the cemetery seemed to suck the remaining light from the night and bring it into themselves. Their glowing faces were devoid of all detail. Standing in a semi-circle around the statue, the creatures of light outnumbered the shadow-and-teeth creatures by one.

“They came,” Mercy said again.

Tom touched the cold, heavy coin in his pocket one more time as arrows and spears of light began flashing past their hideout behind the Black Angel.

No coins are worth all of this, he thought. I should’ve known this deal was screwed when that skinny bastard tried to kiss me before he left the apartment.

Silent now, the surrounded shadow creatures formed a defensive circle, crouching back-to-back in front of the statue. They reached out and formed weapons from the shadows surrounding them. With a surge of mad screeching, they leapt up to attack the figures in white.

Tom realized they were screaming the same thing, over and over again.

“What are they saying?” he asked Mercy.

“Mine,” she said. “Like kids, fighting over a toy. Mine.”

Tom swallowed. “They’re protecting us?”

Mercy put a hand to her forehead, as if massaging a headache. Tom felt something shift inside of him, and his face grew hot with guilt. She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes.

“You could look at it that way, I guess.”

I don’t know this girl, Tom thought. I’m just here for the silver, that’s all.

Battle raged around them as the creatures in white took to the air again, flinging their missiles of light at the shadow beasts. The air was filled with a horrible popping and grinding noise as light met dark, and the weaker of the two canceled out, sometimes dark, sometimes light.

Next to him, Mercy rose to her feet. She began walking toward the fighting creatures with her arms uplifted.

“Stop,” Tom heard her say. A shadow beast and a winged man fought not five feet from her. Tom couldn’t muster the strength to reach for her even as she reached out to the two fighters.

“Stop!” Mercy screamed again.

A heartbeat later, the night sky tore open. A winged man dropped to the earth like a falling star, directly in front of the two creatures. He held his hands at his side, as if for balance, and Tom was reminded of the Black Angel above him.

Who else was coming to this little soirée? he thought madly. Jesus? Moses?

The shadow beasts screamed and fell back into the darkened cemetery, melting once again into the shadows. The other creatures in white dropped onto their faces.

A name filled Tom’s mind. Not Jesus or Moses, but Saraquel.

“Oh, fuck,” he said.

In his mind was a vision of a stone being rolled from the front of an ancient tomb by a giant man with wings longer than Tom was tall. The same winged man stood in front of them, beckoning to Mercy. The hints of eyes and a nose were slowly coming into shape on the man’s white face, and his wings flapped gently, the sound like a huge bellows.

“Why did you come here, Mercedes?”

Tom touched his ear, but the blood was gone, along with the ringing. That voice was too beautiful not to hear clearly.

Standing again, Mercy shuddered in her thin white shirt. She had wriggled out of her leather jacket, and it sat next to Tom, forgotten.

“Did you not realize?” the winged man continued. “Did you want to be caught? They cannot touch you anywhere but here.”

“Maybe,” Mercy said, standing shakily and rubbing her bare arms. “I may have wanted that, Saraquel. The borders are weakest in cemeteries. And I know how much angels hate to lose.”

The man in white shook his head. He was so beautiful Tom wanted to cry, or dash his head on the stone in front of him.

“I saw you fall like lightning from Heaven, Mercedes. We know of your sin, of your compassion for the failings of mortal flesh. But Heaven needs its Angel. We shall take you back.”

“You’d do that? After I deserted you?” Mercy waved a hand at the destruction around her. “After I left you, for this?”

“We shall take you back into our fold. For rehabilitation.” He smiled. “For our Angel of Mercy, we can show you the same.”

She shuddered again, but stepped away from the statue without a look back at Tom. As she walked away from him, Tom felt a small part of himself die.

The creature in white took Mercy’s hand, and immediately the air was filled with the stink of burning flesh. Mercy’s blonde hair burst into a yellow-white flame at the creature’s touch, yet Mercy didn’t even flinch. Instead, she smiled.

The coin slipped from Tom’s nerveless fingers, hitting the cold earth without a sound.

“Nephilim!” shouted the angel holding Mercy. “There will be no rekullah tonight. Mercy is not a commodity to be bartered for and traded for among traitors and hellspawn such as you. Remember the Word and the judgment.”

The creatures of blackness screamed, their ragged voices like the sound of enormous chains, but they dared not pull themselves again from the sheltering shadows.

“Mercy?” Tom said, reeling.

“Tom,” Mercy said, her skin melting into light. Her face was fading and filling with light, as if she was being lit up from the inside. “Don’t question anymore. Heaven has rehab for Fallen like me. I’ll be safe there. In case you were worried.”

Mercy hugged herself, as the outline of a pair of wings took shape around her. “Though it won’t be much fun at first.”

They were gone in a flash of energy that left Tom blinded.

#

“Fuck.”

Blinking hard, Tom stood all alone next to the Black Angel, Mercy’s leather coat next to him like a crumpled bag. His sight was coming back to him, slowly. He grabbed the coat and held it close, trying to inhale the last traces of Mercy before her scent was gone forever.

His solitude lasted a few more seconds before the shadows began to reform again around him. Sharpened, jagged yellow teeth grinned at him as his eyes tried to adjust to the darkness.

“Nephilim! His voice broke as he repeated the name he’d first heard two nights ago. “Remember the deal!”

Harsh laughter answered him.

Tom tried not to let his eyes go out of focus, but they betrayed him. Two of the monstrous teeth men stood on his left, one on his right. The creature in the middle, the largest, approached him. The big one was limping from the pitched battle of short seconds ago. It gave Tom a wicked smile that spread across its monstrously long face. Before his eyes snapped back into focus, Tom could see the sharp yellow teeth covering the creature’s entire body. Those teeth looked hungry.

“Deal?” Its voice was the sound of chewing gravel. “The deal, our rekullah, just abandoned us and left with the fucking angels, dog-boy! With Saraquel,” it spat. “Saraquel the tomb-robber, the stone-mover, the dead-raiser, Saraquel-the-fucking-archangel!”

The shadow creatures pressed closer, and Tom stepped back, unable to breathe. The sound of rattling chains filled the air.

“The wandering Jew betrayed us all,” the creature said. “We should have hanged him when we had the chance.” It moved closer with a heavy rattle of metal and the chattering of teeth. “No, we came here for a soul, dog-boy. We won’t return empty-handed.”

With nowhere left to run, Tom reached up to the statue. With his fingers frozen to the Black Angel, he waited for the teeth.

Frustrated screams burst inside his head. Through his eyelids, another show of white light had erupted. As before, the light came from above. The same senses-shattering explosions that had started the night’s madness began, but in reverse, as if something was being sucked back into oblivion instead of being spat out from there.

After long seconds had passed, he opened his eyes. The biggest of the shadow creatures remained, though it shimmered and faded in and out of focus without Tom having to adjust his vision. It looked to Tom as if the creature was still there only through a sheer act of rage and willpower.

“You have a guardian,” the creature spat. It raised his shadowy, teeth-infested hand until its forefinger touched Tom’s chest. Something black and spiky was lodged in the teeth of that infernal hand, and Tom writhed like a worm on a hook.

“Tonight you will live,” the teeth-beast continued. “But not even she can protect you from my curse. My vengeance against you is this: you shall live forever. That way we won’t have to deal with your betraying soul in the underworld. Ever.”

The shadow beast disappeared with a sucking un-explosion. Tom fell back against the base of the glowing statue, which was already fading, its light losing its power.

“Live forever?” Tom asked the night sky when he was able to breathe again. He saw the flash of silver on the dead grass. “What kind of curse is that?”

A grating voice scratched its way into his mind. “You may change your mind in fifty years, boy. Ask your good friend Judas how it feels. Ask him if he ever tires of his wandering.”

Tom looked behind him at the Black Angel. Fresh tears of rust covered her cheeks, and the imprint of his handprint glowed on her left foot. He bent for the piece of silver, but the coin held the profile of John F. Kennedy now.

Fifty cents for Mercy’s life. Fifty cents to sell his soul.

Swearing under his breath, Tom grabbed Mercy’s leather jacket, and walked off into the night, determined to prove the shadow beast wrong.

#

The old man let go of what was left of the Black Angel statue, his ninety-seven-year-old hand still smooth despite the years since that night eight decades ago. The wind was turning cold, but he didn’t bother fastening his coat. He’d lived in countless small towns and villages around the world during the past eight decades, gambling away fortune after fortune. Always he was able to find money, somehow. He could not starve.

The old man was tired of the constant guilt that fed his loneliness since that night, the nightmares, the fear of shadows. He wished for rest.

Or at the very least, though he knew he did not deserve it, Tom Arneson wished for some kind of mercy.

“I am a fool,” he whispered to the four acres of land scraped clear around him. The people of this new era had beliefs Tom could barely understand. They saw land as too valuable for planting the dead; this cemetery would be a landing strip for the inter-city shuttle in half a year. The Black Angel was probably already melted down and awaiting new life in some nano-factory.

Tom stepped away from the base and froze. He thought he’d heard a familiar voice, calling his name.

“Mercy?” he said, his heart clenching. Was it her voice, he wondered, or the rattle of chains? “Is that you?”

He tried to form words of apology, but they lodged in his throat. He toppled forward, reaching for the base of the statue, but he missed it. The earth rushed up to meet him, pain convulsing him so quickly he had no time to cry out. He was dead before he hit the ground.

The only answer to his question was the sound of ancient, powerful wings.

* * *

Gunning for the Buddha is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

This story for was provided and published with express permission from Michael Jasper and UnWrecked Press.

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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
2. Dark Faith Preview
3. Preview of The Changed by B. J. Burrow

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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Today you die. Today you are reborn. Today you hunt the man who killed you.

It’s Lee Child vs. Altered Carbon in a high-tech blast of tough-as-nails future thrills. Matt Forbeck arrives as the new king of high-concept – with a blockbuster action movie in a book. In the near future, scientists solve the problem of mortality by learning how to backup and restore a persons memories into a vat-bred clone. When Secret Service agent Ronan “Methusaleh” Dooley is brutally murdered, he’s brought back from the dead yet again to hunt his killer, and in doing so uncover a terrible conspiracy.

Flames Rising is pleased to present a excerpt from this new novel by Matt Forbeck.

Amortals by Matt Forbeck

Getting killed always gives me the worst hangover. When I was younger, I thought maybe it had something to do with my soul being forced out of my body and then shoved into the next. Even if I couldn’t remember it, that sort of trauma had to leave some sort of mark on a person’s spirit, right?

“You ready for this, Agent Dooley?”

I rubbed my baby-smooth chin and leaned forward in the chair, flexing my fresh legs. The techs at the Amortals Project had shaved my face micro-clean, which I never liked, but it would grow out fast enough.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen myself die, Patrón.”

The frat-boy-faced man with the slicked-back hair cracked a shadow of his wide smile. His perfect teeth gleamed in the room’s dimmed lights. “Right. I saw the documentary about your first time when I was in grade school.”

“The 2132 version is the best,” I said, battling a sickening sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t we had this conversation the last time? “They went all out for the centennial.”

Patrón snorted. I knew he could look right through my bravado. I didn’t want to watch this. No sane man would.

“That’s Director Patrón, by the way,” he said. “‘Sir’ is fine too. You sure your memory’s working right?”

Hoping he’d attribute my failure to feign respect for him to revivification sickness, I ignored him.

“Just start the show.”

Patrón blinked. I’d known him nearly as long as I’d known anyone alive. He had a strong stomach. “It’s bad, Ronan,” he finally said.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “Does it?”

Patrón shrugged, then waved his hand, and the thrideo leaped to life. The polarizers in my lens implants kicked in, transforming the blurred images into a 3D mirage that looked sharp enough to cut my pupils.

In the third, a man sat bound to a white plastic chair in the center of a small, gray room made of cinderblock walls. He was tall and trim and dressed in a navy blue suit, a red tie, and a white shirt splashed with crimson. His ankles were cuffed to the legs of the chair with self-constricting ties, and his hands were bound behind him, likely with the same.

The man had close-cropped, dark-brown hair and a three-day shadow of a beard. He looked young, maybe about thirty, although it was impossible to tell these days. He wore a black blindfold over his eyes, the kind the first-class stewards hand you for overnight flights. Blood trickled down in twin paths from beneath the fabric, framing the rest of his face.

Despite the blindfold, I knew that face well. It was mine, and I did not look good.

Another figure stepped into view. This new man wore the kind of clean suit you see in microchip laboratories, complete with the full headgear and the mirrored faceplate, except it was all black. Loose and bulky, it covered him from head to toe like a high-tech burka.

The new man carried a 9mm semi-automatic Nuzi pistol in his right hand. The safety was already off. He tapped it against his leg before he began to talk.

“I suppose,” the new man said in a voice that had been digitally garbled, “that you’re wondering what you’re doing here today, Mr Methuselah Dooley.” I winced at the nickname. The press had slapped that on me over a hundred years ago, and I’d never been able to shake it.

The previous version of me – the one about to die in the thrideo – grunted but did not say a word.

A trickle of blood escaped from his mouth as he tried to speak. The tongue in my mouth recoiled at the ghost of a traumatic memory I didn’t actually have.

“Don’t answer,” the man in the black suit said. “This isn’t for you. You’ll be dead soon. It’s for later, for them.”

Patrón glanced at me, but I ignored him. The man in the suit knew exactly what he was doing. We just had to watch to find out what that was.

I knew I could stop the recording to chat with Patrón if I wanted to. I could rewind it, even watch it dozens of times today. My first time through, though, I wanted to absorb every bit of it without interruption, to see it as it happened.

Something inside of me wanted to turn away, to avoid this horrible spectacle. I ignored that impulse.

The man in the suit snarled, and the man in the chair began to panic. He struggled against the bracelets holding him in place, thrashing about in the chair, straining hard enough to put shining stress lines in the bracelets, even though it only made them bite harder into his flesh. The chair’s legs had been bolted to the floor, or it would have gone over for sure. Maybe that’s what the man in the chair had been hoping for, although it wouldn’t have done him any good.

I stared at the man in the chair as his struggles abated. The bracelets had cut right through his socks, and blood trickled into his shoes. Unable to get free, he gave up the fight and began to weep.

Patrón squirmed a bit in his chair. “That sort of behavior unusual for you, Dooley?”

I ignored the crack. If the man in the chair had wept, it might mean he was trying to tell me something. I’d seen myself die times before, several times, and I’d never done anything of the sort.

The man in black shifted his gun to his left hand, then reached out and slapped the man in the chair with a gloved palm. “Get a hold of yourself, Meth,” he said. “You’ll disappoint your fans.”

The man in the chair – I couldn’t bring myself to call him Ronan or Dooley or even Methuselah – whimpered at this, but the tears ended, and he did not grunt another word. I felt my fists clench. I wanted to jump up and take out the man in black – tear the life from him with my bare hands – then rescue the doomed man. It was too late though. Real as the images seemed, I was watching the past. This had already happened.

“This is what the Secret Service does for you, eh, Meth?” the man in black said. “Give them your life, and they only ask if they can have another.”

The man in the chair let his head loll back on his shoulders. I wasn’t sure he was still alive.

The man in black leaned forward and whispered something into the other man’s ear. The audio leaped up to compensate for the difference in volume. I could hear it through the bone conductors tapped into the base of my skull.

“And you,” the man in black said, “you give it to them.”

The man in the chair flinched at these words, spoken as softly as a promise to a sleeping lover.

The man in black straightened back up again. “You sicken me,” he said. “You’re like a dog. All those years serving your country and your President. How much did that cost you? Your wife. Your kid. Your grandchildren. Every last one of your lives.”

The man in the chair slumped over in the chair, his shoulders slumped, his head hanging low. He’d been beaten in every way.

“You’re not even a man,” the man in the clean suit said. “You’re just a distant echo of the original.

A cheap, vat-grown copy. You fade more every time you bounce back into this world. I’d say you’d be nothing soon, but you’re already there. Every breath you take subtracts from those the original Ronan Dooley breathed a hundred and fifty years ago.”

The man in the black suit leaned in and brushed the other man’s sweat-soaked hair back with the barrel of his gun. The gesture would have seemed tender with just about any other instrument.

“You think just because you’re amortal you’re special. That you can’t really die. That it doesn’t really matter if you do. It’s a great set-up, at least for people like you. One body dies, just go to the whole brain backup and restore it into a clone. You don’t even have to remember the pain of death or the fear it brings. You’re like an alcoholic who blacks out before beating his wife. In your head, it’s like it never happened.”

The man in black knelt down in front of the chair. He swapped his pistol back to his right hand and pressed the tip of his gun against the other man’s forehead, then pushed the bleeding man’s head up and back until it was level with his own.

“What you forget,” the man with the gun said. “What people like you always forget is that a copy is not the original. It may look, sound, smell, taste, feel, and even act like the original, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. It’s a substitute, a replacement, a simulacrum, a doppelganger.”

I swore I could hear the man sneer as he continued. “People are not digital files recorded in a meat medium. We are flesh and blood, and we are unique. You may be a perfect copy, but you’re still a copy. Somewhere, the fleshless bones of the original Ronan Dooley are spinning in his rotted grave.”

The head of the man in the chair pulled back from the pistol for a moment, then lolled to the side.

The man with the gun reached out and grabbed the other man by the shoulder and sat him upright again.

“You’re not a man,” the man in black said. “You’re a ghost made flesh, condemned to haunt this world until the day your number comes up again. Even amortals can only cheat death for so long.”

The man in black stood now and placed the tip of the barrel of his gun against the other man’s forehead.

“Today’s the day,” he said. “It’s time for your run on this Earth to end.”

* * *

This preview was provided for and posted with express permission from Matt Forbeck and Angry Robot.

Pre-Order Amortals today at Amazon.com.

Related posts:

1. 12 for ’12 Interview with Matt Forbeck
2. Matt Forbeck tells us about Amortals
3. Amortals Novel Review

I am pleased to present you with a free flash fiction piece as my Halloween treat to you. This story is entitled “A Different Kind of Treat.” For more about my games, stories and books, visit www.mlwrites.com.

A Different Kind of Treat

Blood-red shafts of sunlight filter through a dirty cabin window, kissing a row of colorful glass bottles. One by one the bottles shine with anticipation as they reveal their grisly contents. Three eyes spin in a green flask; a pair of wings beats urgently in another.

“What’s that, Momma?” A child’s finger points to a jar of wrinkled entrails sitting high on a kitchen shelf. The boy, who stands about three feet tall, is covered in dust and flour. His skin is marred with muddy blisters.

“Oh nothing special, Alwin,” Belinda replies airily as she pulls a frilly apron over her head. “Just something I cook with now and again. You hungry?”

“Want candy.” Alwin rubs his bloated stomach. “Chocolate, ‘specially.”

She flashes him a crooked grin and picks a small book off the burnished wood counter. Has it really been a year since she last used her recipe book? Lately, it seems like all of her time has been devoted to nursing Alwin. No matter what she gives him — cinnamon, tincture of licorice or willow bark roots — nothing seems to help him get any better.

“Maybe I missed something,” Belinda whispers as she scans through her book. Her gnarled fingers turn the pages gingerly, as if each leaf of paper is a cherished family heirloom.

“What’s this, momma?”

Belinda rolls her eyes. She has to concentrate and she can’t think if he keeps talking. She knows he’s lonely, but there’s nothing she can do about that. Born under a harvest moon, Alwin’s only friends were the ravens that often circled the skies above their cabin. His insatiable curiosity was the only thing Belinda didn’t like about him. Then again, he was only a year old. “What’s what, honey?”

“This.” Alwin shows her a fistful of waxy hair. “It’s from my head.”

Belinda’s paper-thin lips crumple into a disapproving scowl. She can’t afford to babysit Alwin while she mixes and measures the necessary ingredients for tonight’s confection. Either he’s going to help her in the kitchen, or she needs to find something else for him to do. Thinking quickly, she pulls a red bottle off a shelf. “Just put those strands in here and we’ll figure out where they belong later.”

Alwin ignores her and yanks more hair right out of his crusty scalp.

Dark splotches bloom all over Alwin’s pasty neck; she knows what they mean. Her last spell was a total failure. Thinking quickly, she tries something else. “Why don’t you grab your costume?”

Alwin runs around the room in a circle chanting at the top of his lungs. “Trick-or-treat. Smell my feet. Give me something good to eat.”

Belinda crosses her bony arms and regards him sternly. She has to get him out of her hair, but she doesn’t have the heart to kill him. He doesn’t have that much time left, but she still feels responsible for him. “You can collect some firewood for the oven first.”

She knows the boy won’t stray very far from the cabin. If the trees and the corn fields don’t confuse him, the owls will corner him. Just last night, Belinda had awakened to the sound of a screeching owl perched above his bed. It was as if the entire forest not only knew what Alwin was, they were eager to share the secret. So far, no human — not even the townsfolk that lived just a few miles away — knows who she is or what she’s been up to. “That’s a good thing,” she thinks. Lost in her thoughts, Belinda barely hears her son’s whimper.

“Outside, momma. Outside.” Alwin moans softly.

Leaning forward, Belinda looks at him straight in the eye. “Do you think you’ll back by supper?”

“Yes, momma.”

She knows Alwin won’t last that long. His skin is crumbling and his fingers are starting to wither. If that isn’t bad enough — he reeks of mold.

To take her mind off of Alwin’s predicament, Belinda opens her enchanted book to her favorite recipe. She can’t help but smile as she gathers the ingredients and dumps them into her cauldron: tiny snails, fat slugs, pumpkin seeds, a virgin’s eyes.

Belinda drops a pulsing heart into the thickening dough and stirs it with all her might. “This’ll turn out right this time, I just know it.”

Alwin pulls a rubber mask over his crumbling face. “Can I help?”

“Not this time, Alwin, but you can watch Berthold rise.”

“Who’s Berthold? Is it candy?”

“No, he’s a different kind of treat, Alwin. The kind that’ll be good forever.”

“Sounds tasty, Momma.”

Belinda licks her lips. “Oh, I hope so, Alwin. I hope so.”

Related posts:

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FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a look at how the fictional small town of Pinebox, Texas celebrates Halloween. Dubbed “Fall Fest,” find out how these residents get into the spirit of the season. For more about Pinebox and the games and stories that take place there, visit 12 to Midnight.

Fall Fest in Pinebox, Texas

While East Texas lakes lure hordes of sport fishermen every Summer, most travelers find Autumn the best time to visit the region. By October, one or more cold fronts have swept through the lower states and pushed out the high humidity and higher temperatures. Temperate weather makes it easier to enjoy the beautiful piney woods, the lakes, and “local flavor.”

Chief among the must-see attractions in East Texas is the Pinebox Fall Fest. Beginning on Halloween and ending on Day of the Dead, the town of Pinebox holds an enormous celebration that draws thousands of visitors each year.

“I like Fall Fest because we get out of school,” says Joni Hightower, age 9. With so many civic organizations involved in the festival, even the local school district incorporates the days off into their district calendar.

The Pinebox Fall Fest tradition began in the 19th century, although it was discontinued for a time at the behest of local religious leaders who felt that the celebration promoted paganism. The modern Fall Fest capitalizes on the fun and frivolity of Halloween ghosts and goblins while acknowledging religious sensitivities through more serious religious services incorporated throughout the festival.

The annual Fall Fest begins on Halloween morning with an interfaith blessing of food and drink. In generations past, Fall Fest was celebrated with a city-wide potluck dinner. In the days before refrigeration, some meals didn’t preserve as well as others, leading to food poisoning, “strange behavior”, and even deaths during the celebration. Thus it became tradition for local religious leaders to bless each individual dish. Today, a team of religious leaders from local churches bless the contents of each booth in the food and drink vending tents.

“I’m not superstitious, but ever since Pastor Fennell started blessing the Kiwanis Club hot dog booth 15 years ago we haven’t failed a single health inspection,” said club treasurer Jay Boatwright. “It’s all in good fun…but why take chances?”

After the morning blessing, a Fall Fest parade winds its way through the normally quiet streets. Some kids participate in the parade two or three times, marching at the front of the parade in the high school band then running back to the beginning to join a float. At the parade’s conclusion, revelers filter to the square in front of the county courthouse, where tents provide shelter for food vendor booths, a live music stage, and more.

As the sun sets on Halloween and the shadows lengthen across the square, hundreds of costumed revelers . Early in the evening, parents take the children through the food vendor tent for safe trick-or-treating.

“We’re glad to promote a safe alternative to going door to door,” says Chamber of Commerce spokesperson Ramona DeLeon. “As a parent, I know that I can give my kids a Halloween experience at the Trick-or-Treat Tents without worrying about razor blades in the candy or disappearing for three days with no memory of where they had been.”

“I like it, but it’s a little scary too” says Lashawna Curtis, age 8. “You can’t tell who anyone is ‘cause they’re all in masks. You don’t know who is really behind the mask.”

As the night grows later and the little ghosts, superheroes, and princesses go home, live bands draw adult costumed revelers through a cordoned-off street for an outdoor concert and block party. Midnight is marked by the Grand Unveiling when partiers all remove their masks—sometimes finding surprises at whom they’ve been dancing or flirting with.

“Sure back in the ‘80s we had a problem with underage drinking and a lot of shenanigans with mistaken identity, but we have that all under control now” says Sheriff Butch Anderson. “The street dance is probably one of the safest places to be during Fall Fest. We have more than a dozen uniformed and undercover officers on site to keep trouble from happening.”

Trouble is something that Fall Fest has struggled with from time to time. During Fall Fest the town’s population triples in size, causing accommodation and parking shortages, traffic accidents, and even the occasional missing partier.

“Fall Fest is a great time—don’t get me wrong. But with all those folks walking here and there at night…well, it pays to be careful. Sometimes it’s just older kids being mean, you know? But sometimes it isn’t,” White says. “I guess it wouldn’t be Halloween if sometimes things didn’t go bump in the night.”

Preston Dubose – 2010

Check out all of the Pinebox Adventures at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Related posts:

1. Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas Anthology Preview
2. Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas Review
3. Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas Book Trailer

]]> http://www.flamesrising.com/halloween-and-fall-fest-in-pinebox-texas/feed/ 0 http://www.flamesrising.com/aldwyns-academy-preview/ http://www.flamesrising.com/aldwyns-academy-preview/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:30:47 +0000 Flames http://www.flamesrising.com/?p=9966 Enter a school for magic where even the first day can be (un)deadly... On the very first day of school at the world-famous Aldwyns Academy for Wizardry, fledgling wizard Dorian Ravensmith finds himself immersed in a mystery. White wolves have been attacking incoming students. Ghosts are haunting the Snapping Dragon Gardens. And the professors lurk in the halls, whispering about a shadowy wizard who seems to be behind it all. That night, Dorian spies a figure creeping into the Snapping Dragon Gardens and and he follows, certain that with the help of a few magic items and simple potions, he can catch the culprit by daybreak and return a hero. But as hobgoblins, banshees, and a terrifying dragon try to stop him at every turn, Dorian discovers that he's stepped into an (un)deadly trap that could not only destroy his future as a wizard but also the beloved wizardry school. Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of this new book by Nathan Meyer. Aldwyn's Academy is a companion Novel to A Practical Guide to Wizardry from Mirrorstone. Related posts:

1. Exploring the Mythos Academy with Jennifer Estep
2. Preview of Nocturne by L.D. Harkrader
3. Gold Dragon Codex Preview

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Enter a school for magic where even the first day can be (un)deadly…

On the very first day of school at the world-famous Aldwyns Academy for Wizardry, fledgling wizard Dorian Ravensmith finds himself immersed in a mystery. White wolves have been attacking incoming students. Ghosts are haunting the Snapping Dragon Gardens. And the professors lurk in the halls, whispering about a shadowy wizard who seems to be behind it all.

That night, Dorian spies a figure creeping into the Snapping Dragon Gardens and and he follows, certain that with the help of a few magic items and simple potions, he can catch the culprit by daybreak and return a hero. But as hobgoblins, banshees, and a terrifying dragon try to stop him at every turn, Dorian discovers that he’s stepped into an (un)deadly trap that could not only destroy his future as a wizard but also the beloved wizardry school.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of this new book by Nathan Meyer. Aldwyn’s Academy is a companion Novel to A Practical Guide to Wizardry from Mirrorstone.

“Preparation separates good wizards from great wizards.”
—A Practical Guide to Wizardry

Chapter One of Aldwyn’s Academy by Nathan Meyer

Dorian did not want to go to school.

He stared out the frosted window of the carriage sleigh. Outside, shadows clung like hooded jailers to massive trees and cast gloom over the winter snowpack.

Four great white stallions drew the carriage as it raced along the winding road leading up from the coast to the mountain plateau of Aldwyns Academy, the realm’s premier school of wizardry.

Dorian pushed his head back into a fur-covered headrest.

His heart felt cold as the many icicles he saw hanging from the branches of the trees. For months his mother had seen to his education, providing him with a wand and drilling him relentlessly on the simpler potions and spells to prepare him for his time at the wizardry school.

She was a powerful mistress of divination, or information magic, and she had ways of knowing beyond the ken of mortal man. She assumed he would also follow 4 her down the path of information magic in his time at the academy, and this assumption was a source of many of their arguments.

He could barely settle himself long enough to read a book on most days. How would he ever learn the calm mental state required to research wisdom from the realms ethereal?

If only his father hadn’t been gone, fighting insurgents in the borderlands. Then Dorian might have been able to attend the military college at the Citadel. His father would have insisted on it.

But no, his mother wanted him at Aldwyns, and with no one to stand up for him, Dorian had no choice but to go.

“The winter certainly comes early to the mountains,” his mother said. “The leaves have barely turned colors at the court and already snow is thick here on the plateau.”

She stoked the little brazier glowing red in the floor.

“Don’t forget to wear your cloak when you go outside. It’s chillier than you’re used to, and I don’t want you catching a cold on the first week of school.”

Dorian shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“You better care, young man.” His mother, Serissa, adjusted the robes in her lap. “You’ll be tested on all sorts of elementary spells and potions from A Practical Guide to Wizardry. And the results of those tests will determine your placement in your classes. You must do well. Now, let’s review a few of them right now. What are the magic words for the Shield spell?”

Dorian knew the answer but he did not bother to reply. He refused to give her the satisfaction. Instead, he kept his gaze fixed out the window. He suddenly caught his first sight of his new home looming above the trees. Soaring towers rose from walls of heavy stones. The academy’s sloping roofs and buttresses lay heavy with snow. Here and there, a chimney leaked smoke into the pale sky. How can this be a home? Dorian thought. A streak of gray flashed against the snow-covered trees. Dorian blinked and sat up.

“Honestly, Dor, you’re as stubborn as your father,” his mother said.

“He says I’m as stubborn as you,” Dorian muttered. He could see nothing else through the window. The snow and wind must have played tricks on his eyes.

“Yes, well mind your tongue around Professor Fife. She doesn’t appreciate a sassy pupil.”

“Well I don’t appreciate her!” Dorian shouted. He knew the driver and footman could hear everything he shouted, but he didn’t care. “I don’t want to go to this school! I want to be a warrior like Father!”

His mother rocked back. Bright points of color appeared on her cheeks. “Well your father hasn’t been around much, has—” The howling cut her off. Just beyond the trees, a massive wolf appeared out of the gloom. The creature seemed to stare directly at Dorian. The beast’s lips curled back, revealing fangs like yellow knives.

Dorian heard his mother muttering in that strange, arcane language he was coming to the academy to learn.

The short hairs on the back of his arms and neck rose in response to the summoned energy. A blue light emanated in an aura from her hands. Her fingers wove patterns of power in the frigid air. The wolf’s howl was answered by three more on all sides of the racing sleigh, and Dorian heard the horses shriek in terror.

His mother snapped her hands together and emerged from her trance.

“There is magic and evil in this,” she said. “Those are no hungry winter wolves driven mad by the smell of horse flesh. Those beasts are dire wolves.”

Suddenly the hooves of the terrified horses left the hard-packed snow of the road and struck the thick wooden planks of a bridge. Dorian looked out of the carriage as the woods gave way to a steep chasm plunging down to a rushing river swirling around jutting rocks. The dire wolves jumped the gulf in unison and charged for the sleigh.

“Mom!” he cried.

Those wolves weren’t natural. They were monsters. The carriage crossed the bridge onto the road. Looking back across the mountain crevice, he saw something other than a dire wolf make that impossible jump.

The shape was little more than a shadow, but Dorian glimpsed a humanlike figure with horns on its head. Just as he caught a brief glance of the form, his vision was blocked by a wall of tree trunks.

“Dorian, get down!” his mother shouted as one of the massive wolves leaped from the tree line directly at the carriage. The pane of glass in front of him shattered. His mother’s hand snatched him up by his cloak and yanked him away from the shattered window. Her arm shot out as the twisted face of the beast appeared in the window.

It snarled.

Blue lightning sparked in jagged bolts from her fingers and lanced into the beast. The wolf yelped in pain and fell away. Two more of the pack struck the other side of the carriage, and he felt his center of gravity shift. He heard the coachmen screaming, heard the horses screaming, heard himself screaming as everything spun.

Dorian felt his mother’s arms envelop him. She whispered words of power as the carriage rolled.

Everything he saw was tinged with gold, but when they abruptly landed, he realized he wasn’t hurt.

She saved us, he thought. She saved me. Then he didn’t have time to think anything else because the wolves were upon them.

* * *

This preview for was provided by and published with express permission from Mirrorstone.

Aldwyn’s Academy is available for now at Amazon.com.

Related posts:

1. Exploring the Mythos Academy with Jennifer Estep
2. Preview of Nocturne by L.D. Harkrader
3. Gold Dragon Codex Preview

]]> http://www.flamesrising.com/aldwyns-academy-preview/feed/ 0 http://www.flamesrising.com/taste-of-blood-roses-preview/ http://www.flamesrising.com/taste-of-blood-roses-preview/#comments Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:45:39 +0000 Flames http://www.flamesrising.com/?p=8712 A TASTE OF BLOOD AND ROSES is a collection of horror short stories that spans two decades of work by Bram Stoker Award winning author David Niall Wilson. From the streets of Jerusalem to the historical life of Vlad Tepes, follow this prolific author through eleven tales of vampirism, lycanthropy, and darkness. There’s a bit of dark humor, a touch of the erotic, and a little something for everyone who loves creatures of the night. Also…these vampires are guaranteed not to sparkle. Flames Risingis pleased to present a short story entitled A Candle in the Sun for you to read from this anthology by David Niall Wilson. Related posts:

1. The Girls with Games of Blood Chapter Preview
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3. This is My Blood Preview

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A TASTE OF BLOOD AND ROSES is a collection of horror short stories that spans two decades of work by Bram Stoker Award winning author David Niall Wilson. From the streets of Jerusalem to the historical life of Vlad Tepes, follow this prolific author through eleven tales of vampirism, lycanthropy, and darkness. There’s a bit of dark humor, a touch of the erotic, and a little something for everyone who loves creatures of the night. Also…these vampires are guaranteed not to sparkle.

The author, David Niall Wilson, adds:

“I’ve been writing since the mid 1980s, and during all those years, vampires have remained close to my heart. There were periods when it seemed as if you couldn’t have an anthology unless the theme was erotic vampire stories. There were other times when all you heard was, “no vampires.” I can say that I survived both – even selling a vampire story to two editors who said they didn’t think they’d ever buy another one. Both of those are contained in this collection.

The short story A Candle in the Sun (originally titled The Fifth Gospel), was written on a US Navy ship. Someone – I don’t remember who – said, “What if Jesus was a vampire.” I said that wouldn’t work, but what if someone near him was? The rest, pretty much, is history. I turned it in to my writer’s group and Richard Rowand, then editor of STARSHORE magazine, asked to buy the story immediately. My first pro sale that wasn’t porn to a men’s magazine. This story has been reprinted several times. One of those times was by Karl Edward Wagner in Year’s Best Horror XIX – he was the first of the editors who said they thought they were done with vampires. He was also – over the years – a good friend. He is missed.”

Flames Rising is pleased to present the short story A Candle in the Sun from the A TASTE OF BLOOD AND ROSES anthology by David Niall Wilson for you to read here on FlamesRising.com.

A Candle in the Sun

by David Niall Wilson

Lucifer watched with deep interest, and some concern, the arrival of The Christ upon the Earth.  Well aware that he could not prevent it, and unwilling to forego the amusement, in any case, he set about sowing the seeds of jealousy, fear, and distrust that would later lead to the crucifixion. Once satisfied, he waited for the child to grow. A small mountain of dead children grew on Christ’s birthday, sacrificed by those who feared the birth of a king.

Men are often given to strange excesses in the solving, or prevention, of problems.  I saw it as a shame; Lucifer saw the destruction not at all.  His eyes were turned Heavenward in search of a glimpse of the anger he knew his actions would spark. I walked the Earth in his shadow, watching. In the Christ, he saw another part of his enemy, another work to corrupt.  I saw beauty, a piece of something forever lost to me.  Lucifer saw none of that; his hate had become too great.  I saw him as he was, and I loved him. The Christ was very beautiful.

* * *

{From the Book of the Gospel, According to Judas Iscariot}

Judas 1:1

1 And it came to pass that Jesus went alone into the desert to be tempted of the devil.
2 He remained there forty days and forty nights, fasting, and on the fortieth night, he hungered.
3 The tempter came before him then, asking, “If you are truly the son of God, turn these stones to loaves of bread”
4 Jesus answered him, “It is written:  ‘man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
  5 Then the tempter led him to the highest point of the temple. 
6 “If you are truly the son of God, cast yourself down, for it is written:
‘He will command his angels  concerning you,
And they will lift you up in their hands,
So that you will not strike your foot against stone.’”
7 Jesus answered, “It is also written, ‘do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
8 The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all of the kingdoms of the world in their splendor.
9 “Bow down and worship me,” he said, “and I will give them all to you.”
10 Jesus replied, “Away from me, Satan, for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”
11 The devil laughed and gestured, raising from the sands a temptress. 
12 “See here the things craved by man,” he said, waving his arm to include the cities below. 
13 “You are Son of man, does she not please you?”
14 And Jesus, seeing that she was fallen from Heaven, and sorely used, beckoned to the temptress, saying, “For all who would follow me, there burns a light in my father’s house.”
15 And the temptress fell to her knees, forsaking the devil and his darkness.
16 In an awful rage, Lucifer laid upon her a curse, bringing a great thirst which could be sated only by the lifeblood of man, and saying, “Feast you upon the fruits of his labor, for I say unto you, you shall be his undoing.”
16 Then the devil left them, and angels came and attended Jesus.
17 Fleeing into the desert, the temptress wept.

***

I hid for many days among the burning sands, and the thirst grew, grasping at my thoughts and twisting them beyond my control.  I heard echoing laughter in the pits below, but had no concentration to spare it. As the sun dipped a final time, on the eighth day, I came to the fringes of the city of Galilee. At that time, the horror of what had befallen me was not clear in my mind.  I slipped through the shadows of the city as a silent mist, searching for that which could end the thirst, hungering for freedom to follow him who had promised me hope. 

***

Isabella, late in returning to her home from that of her sister, Jessamine, stopped at the sound of footsteps in the night. No direction lay in the sound.  It seemed to echo from every shadow. When her steps ceased, the others ceased as well. Her heart sped nervously, and she called out to the night. “Who is there?” Straining to hear an answer, she heard the whispering rustle of silk, nothing more.  More loudly, she called out again, “Please, who is it?  May I pass in peace?”

A figure melted from what had seemed only mist, moving slowly and silently forward. It was a woman. Isabella’s shoulders loosened somewhat. As the woman approached, Isabella caught sight of her eyes, tormented, anguished eyes, lost. Catching her breath, she reached out, wanting somehow to help.

“Who are you, lady, and what is wrong?” She asked, stepping forward. “May I help? I…”

The eyes were horrible in their pain. She felt drawn to them by more than compassion, unable to pull her gaze from their depths.  Far, far too late, she forced her eyes down, down to where trembling lips parted, lips of deepest, darkest red, framing teeth that gleamed and sparkled with captured moonlight.

She struggled against the control o the eyes, against her fear. Her lips formed words, screams, any sound to negate the horror. They left her only a whisper, caught in the night breeze and borne away. The teeth were long, curved and sharp, inhuman.  They drew nearer now with shocking speed.  The morning dew misted on the chill, pale skin of Isabella’s motionless form.  She lay, awaiting the morning sun, broken and lifeless. There were twin punctures in the softness of her throat, and a ghastly contortion of absolute fear masked the innocent beauty of her face.  There was no blood, but the shadows had lifted.

***

Judas 10:20

20 As he spoke, a ruler came to him and knelt before him, saying “My daughter has died. 
21 Come and lay your hand upon her, and she shall live.” 
22 Jesus rose and followed him as did his disciples.
23 As he walked, a woman who had bled for twelve years reached out to touch his cloak.
24 She said to herself, “If only I touch his cloak, then I shall be healed.”
25 Turning, Jesus saw her and said, “Take heart, daughter, for your faith has healed you.”
26 And the woman was whole from that moment on.
27 When Jesus entered the ruler’s house and saw the musicians and the noisy crowd, he moved them aside. 
28 Seeing that no color remained to the girl’s cheeks, and seeing also the marks upon her throat, he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead, but only sleeping.”
29 They laughed at him.
30 After they had been put outside, Jesus closed the door behind himself, barring it from within.

***

After touching the girl’s throat, which was still and without pulse, Jesus felt a tug at his heart.  A shadow passed the window, and he raised his eyes, now wet with tears, to meet those that faced him.  Weeping also, the temptress only watched to see if he would smite her, removing the hunger, ending the pain.

“Why?” He asked simply, brushing the soft strands of the girl’s hair with tender fingers.

“You heard the curse, Lord,” she responded, unable to hide the bitterness in her words.  “Lucifer saw in my heart that I would die for you. He took steps to insure that I could not. Each night the hunger grows.  I am too weak to fight it. I seek only to follow you.”

Feeling the sincerity in her words, Jesus heaved a sigh of deepest resignation, feeling suddenly the great weight thrust upon his shoulders.

“She may walk again,” he said, simply, and the girl’s eyes fluttered and opened.  She did not smile; her expression was one of need–of desperation.

“Her lifeblood is now a part of me,” the temptress spoke, each word catching at her heart.  “She will hunger as I. You know this is true, why do you raise her to such torment?”

“I am the way, the truth, and the light,” he said, slowly turning to the door. “Even in her torment, she is forgiven. For every such horror unleashed upon my father’s children, I shall exact threefold payment on the day of reckoning.”"And I,” she breathed, fearing the answer to come, “am I forgiven, then?”

Staring deeply within her eyes, Jesus communed with her heart. Since the days when she had walked freely upon the roads of Heaven, she had felt nothing like it.  His purity surrounded her, probed her, and then was gone.

“I shall call you Mary,” he spoke.  “Go with open heart, for we shall meet again.” He turned then, leaving the room with the girl at his side, returning to the disciples and those who waited. Mary, for she gladly accepted the name, departed the window and melted through the crowd, going again into the desert to be alone. Only Judas, who had seen her at the window and noted her odd, exceptional beauty, noted her passing, and he was too much in awe at the miracle of the dead girl walking to dwell upon it.

***

Judas 10:31

31 A woman was seen to pass the window frame and to speak.
32 Taking the girl by the hand, Jesus led her outside, and she lived, though no spark remained to her eyes–except that of hunger–and her pallor was that of death.
33 All stood in awe, and the news spread rapidly throughout the land.
34 Ignoring her father and those about her, the girl walked into the desert and was seen no more.

***

Judas 13:9

9 When Jesus heard of the beheading of John the Baptist, he withdrew to a solitary place by boat. 
10 Hearing this, a great crowd gathered and awaited his arrival, traveling there on foot.
11 Seeing them, Jesus had compassion on them and healed their sick.
12 As darkness began to fall, the disciples came to him saying, “This is a remote place, and the hour is already late. Send the crowds away so that they can go the villages and buy something to eat.” 
13 Jesus replied, “There is no need for them to go away.  We will give them something to eat.”
14 “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they replied.
15 “Bring them to me,” he said.  Jesus directed the people to sit in the grass, and breaking the loaves, raised his eyes to the heavens and gave thanks.
16 Then he gave them to his disciples, who gave them to the people.  They all ate, and were satisfied, and the disciples collected twelve basketfuls of pieces that were left over. 
17 Those that were fed numbered about five thousand men, besides women and children.
18 Immediately after, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. 
19 After the people had departed, one woman remained, Mary of Magdalene, and they spoke at length.

***

As the crowds dispersed, Mary moved slowly forward, watching first from afar for any sign that she was not wanted. She had remained as long in the desert as her will could stand. Again the hunger was upon her.  She stood, wavering, and watched as the son of Man bid farewell to his people. Her heart calmed somewhat, being close to him, but the aching need did not diminish.  Slowly, he turned, seeing her as if from far away, and he came to stand by her side, watching as the last of the crowds disappeared into the distance.

“They have beheaded John,” he said slowly, ignoring the plea in her eyes, “Truly these are evil times.  Your master has sown well.”

“What is death,” she asked, eyes wide, “to one who serves you? It is the victory in the greatest of battles. I wish death would come to me in such service…I hunger again.” With a great sadness in his eyes, he put his hands upon her shoulders. “You suffer because of me, as did John, and I feel your pain. The time is not yet upon us when I can offer you peace. You must follow, remaining close to my side, for I say unto you, the Son of Man is not like other men.  You may feed upon me, for I shall not die.”

Feeling the depth of the emotion in his words, and seeing the tears as they began streaming from his eyes, Mary turned and fled. He did not know, could not know, what might befall him if he offered her salvation.  As one of the fallen, she knew only too well the fire of his father’s wrath. She ran through the desert and into the villages, running until she could no longer concentrate her will upon flight–until the hunger overwhelmed her.  Creeping through the shadows, she tried to rest, but inside her mind, Lucifer laughed, saying, “Mary, time to feed.  The hunger will return you to me.  It is greater than you, or he can conceive. It is my hunger, and I will feast.”

***

Jesus climbed the mountain, sore of heart.  She drew him, even then, and the weight of John’s loss was heavy on his human heart. Stones cut his fingers and feet as he climbed, and the wind chilled him, but he ignored it all.  He ascended to the uppermost ledge that he could reach and knelt upon the cold, dusty stone.

“Forgive me, father,” he prayed, “but I have no answer for this one, now named Mary, and she is sorely beset. Your enemy controls her, but her heart is pure. Give me the strength, lead my steps, for I love her, and I would not see her, or any other, suffer.”

Thunder echoed from the hills, lightning flashed, and still he prayed. No space remained in his father’s heart for those cast out, no redemption was theirs.  Jesus knew, and yet he prayed, for his heart was pure, and he bore no grudge against any who would be saved, no matter their sin. No answers were forthcoming, and he was forced to rise, finally, descending the mountain with heavy heart.

On the horizon, far from shore, he saw the boat with his disciples, his children. He stepped onto the surface of the water, walking slowly after the retreating sails, as waves slapped his legs and stung his cuts with their chill caress.

***

Judas 13:29

29 During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus came to the boat, walking upon the lake.
30 Seeing this, the disciples were terrified. “It is a ghost,” they said, crying out in fear.
31 But Jesus said to them: “Take courage, it is I!  Do not be afraid.”
32 “Lord,” cried Peter, “If it is you, tell me to come to you on the water.”
33 “Come,” he said.
34 Then Peter left the boat, walking on the water toward Jesus.
35 Seeing the wind and the splashing of the waves, he became frightened, and began to sink.
36 Crying out, he said, “Lord, save me!”
37 Jesus reached out his hand, pulling him from the waves, and said, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
38 And when they climbed into the boat the wind died down.
39 Then those who were in the boat worshipped him saying, “Truly you are the son of God.”
40 Then Judas, still confused over the woman, Mary, asked, “Lord, why do you consort with a woman plagued by demons?  Shall you not cleanse the world of darkness?”
41 Jesus looked at him and spoke a parable: “If you take a candle and light it in the darkness, it can be seen for many miles. 
42 Light the same candle in the sun’s rays, and it pales to nothing.
43 I am sent to show the path to my father’s lost sheep.  She is among them. 
44 I say to you, only in the last days shall evil and darkness be washed away, for in their very darkness, they glorify the light of the heavens.”
45 So saying, he fell silent, and spoke to no man as long as they were upon the boat.”

***

Judas 15:20

20 About eight days after saying this, Jesus took Peter, John, and James with him and went onto a mountain to pray.
21 As he prayed, the appearance of his face changed and his clothing became bright, like a flash of lightning.
22 Two men, Elijah and Moses, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus.
23 They spoke of his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment in Jerusalem.
24 They spoke as well of the temptress, Mary, whose soul Jesus would save.
25 There were looks of sadness on the faces of his companions, then, for they knew the father’s heart was hardened to the fallen, and they feared now for his son. 26 They had no answer for him, though they bid him not to fear. 
27 Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory, and the two men standing with him.
28 As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.  (He knew not what he said)
29 While he spoke, a cloud appeared, enveloping them all, and they were afraid.
30 A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my son, whom I have chosen.  Heed his words.”
32 When the voice had spoken, the cloud dispersed, and they were alone with Jesus, who had tears in his eyes.
33 The apostles decided to keep this to themselves, and told no one what they had seen, or heard, at that time.

***

Judas 17:1

1 A man named Lazarus was sick.  He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.  This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same who had poured perfume on the Lord and washed his feet with her hair.
2 The sisters sent word to Jesus saying, “Lord, one you love is dying.”
3 “This sickness shall not end in death,” Jesus said, “No; it is for God’s glory, so that God’s son may be glorified by it.”
4 Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, yet upon hearing the nature of the illness; he waited two days before going to them.
5 There were reports that Lazarus bore strange punctures on his throat, and his pallor was deathly and pale.
6 Then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”
7 But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews tried to stone you, and yet you are going back there?”
8 “There are twelve hours of daylight,” Jesus answered, “a man who walks by daylight will not stumble, for he sees by this world’s light.  It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light.”
9 After saying this, he went on to explain.  “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, I go to awaken him.”
10 His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.”
11 Jesus spoke of death, but they did not understand.
12 Then he said plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake, I am glad I was not there, so that your faith may grow.
13 Let us go to him, for the darkness from which he must awaken is of my own creation, and there is another there whom I seek.
14 Then Thomas said, “Come, let us follow that we may die with him.”

***

When the word of Jesus’ return reached the sisters, Martha hurried out to meet him.  Mary, deep in mourning, would not leave the house. She babbled of dark, shadowed women, and blood, and many feared she was either mad, or possessed of demons.

“Lord,” Martha pleaded, as she arrived at his side, “If you had been here, I know my brother would not have died. Even now, I know, whatever you ask, God shall give it to you.” Jesus saddened, doubting this in his heart, but he answered, “Your brother shall rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know he will rise in the last days, at the resurrection.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”

“Yes Lord,” she replied, falling to her knees and brushing his legs with her hair, eyes wide.  “I believe you are The Christ, son of God, who has come to the earth as a man.”

“Where is your sister, Mary?” He asked.

“I will send her to you, Lord,” Martha answered, rising. “She is mad with grief, speaking of demons and shadows and afraid to walk, even in daylight.”

“I shall comfort her,” he said, seating himself on a stone to wait. “Send her to me.”

Martha rushed back to her sister’s side with Jesus’ message, hope blooming in her heart.  She had lost her brother already. She did not wish to lose Mary as well.

When Mary heard that Jesus had come, she rose, as though frightened, and ran from the house, much to Martha’s shock.  Several of the others there, believing Mary was going to Lazarus’s tomb to mourn, followed a short distance behind.

Mary’s breath came in short gasps, and the sharp stones of the road cut into her feet as she ran.  Every three or four paces she looked over her shoulder, eyes wide with fear, searching the pockets of shadow surrounding the trail. Her heart pounded wildly in her breast, threatening to burst from her skin.  Stumbling into the grouped disciples, she staggered to Jesus, falling to the ground at his feet, sobbing.

Reaching down, Jesus took her by the hands and raised her to face him.  “What is wrong, Mary?”  He asked, searching her tear-stained face.  Her entire body trembled, like that of a frightened colt, ready to bolt and run.

“Lord,” she choked out, dragging huge gulps of air into her lungs, “Lord, my brother has been killed by a demon!”

Jesus showed no doubt, only asked what she meant, and she answered, “She came in the night.  I saw her twice, a woman wearing only a cloak of shadows.  She drank of his blood, Lord, leaving him weaker with each visit. She had fangs. Lord, I am frightened for my brother’s soul!”

“Take me to where you have laid him,” Jesus said, “and fear not.”

When they reached the place, a cave which had been sealed by the placement of a very large stone, Jesus looked upon it and wept. The people who had followed Mary in her flight saw this and said, “See how Jesus loved him?”

But Jesus cried only a little for Lazarus.  His heart was heavy with the knowledge of who was responsible, with the weight of another soul. The face of the temptress, Mary, haunted his thoughts, her fate haunted his tears.  He turned to Mary, Lazarus’s sister.

“Have them remove the stone, daughter,” he said.

“But Lord,” she protested, eyes wide, “it has been four days! Already the smell of rot will be upon him…why must we do this?”

And Jesus, weary of heart, replied, “Did I not tell you that, if you believed, you would witness my father’s glory? Open the tomb.”

***

Judas 18:39

39 So they took away the stone.  Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, in all things you hear me.  I say this not for myself, but for those standing here, that they may believe you have sent me.”
40 When he had said this, Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth.”
41 The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped in strips of linen, and a cloth binding his face.
42 Jesus said, “Take off the grave clothes, and let him go.”

***

And Lazarus, staggering in the sunlight, came forth from his tomb.  The wind billowed his stringy hair about his head, and his eyes glowed with the light of hunger. Facing Jesus, he removed the shroud from his face, revealing the white, pale skin beneath.  When he smiled, all present shuddered and backed away.  His teeth, glistening in the light, were pointed, like those of a serpent. “Son of man,” he called, “you have granted me that I may walk again, though the price is great.  Why must I suffer so?”

And Jesus, speaking slowly and clearly, answered. “When the last days come, your soul shall be remembered.  Know that I am with you, go in peace.”  “I will go, but in hunger, not peace,” the dead man snarled, glaring about at those assembled in hatred.  Then there was a flash of mist, pungent with the cloying scent of open graves and death, and when it cleared, Lazarus was gone. Only the empty tomb remained.

Jesus, weeping openly again, pulled the sisters, Martha and Mary, to his side and comforted them, wiping the fear from their hearts with his touch. Gesturing to his disciples, he bid them stay with the crowd, and he went off after Lazarus. He found the dead man in the shadows of an old well. “Lazarus,” he called out, “come to me!” 

Unable to resist, the dead man complied.  “What now, Son of Man,” he called out in fear. “Have you come to kill the evil you have created, now that they have seen?  Was it only a show for their benefit, the casting aside of my soul?”

The words cut deeply, and Jesus’ voice trembled as he answered. He knew that what he was about to do was not a part of his father’s plan.  He could not help his heart, though, and was unable to witness Lazarus’s suffering.

“Come to me, Lazarus,” he said, tilting his head to one side, “for I have promised that you will live, and I know of your hunger and she who brought it upon you.  Feed you from the blood of the Son of Man, and be renewed.  Fear not, I shall not die, for it is not yet my time.”

Lazarus gazed in wonder, backing away at first, but the temptation to sate his need was too great, and the power of Jesus’ voice compelled him. Drawing near, he leapt wildly, sinking his fangs deeply into flesh and causing Jesus to stagger, moaning from the pain.  Despite the agony, Jesus stood quietly, and moments later, Lazarus stopped, stumbling backward to collapse on the sand.

Recovering quickly, and causing his own wounds to heal, Jesus gathered Lazarus into his arms and returned the way he had come.  The man he carried, no longer pale, breathed easily. Lazarus lived, though the spark in Jesus’ eyes was a bit dimmer, and his steps slightly uneven. Delivering Lazarus to his sisters, he said, “Take him home, for he must rest.  I have cast forth his demon, and he is whole. Now I, too, must rest.”

Seeing that Lazarus’ teeth were those of a normal man, and that he slept peacefully, the crowd murmured in wonder, and rushed to spread the news of what he had done. As the crowds left them, Jesus called aside his disciple, Judas Iscariot, and spoke to him alone.

“Go to the village,” he said, “find the woman, Mary of Magdalene, and bring her to me.”

“But Lord,” Judas said, frightened for his master, “she has followed us, and where she goes, evil goes as well. Why must I bring her here?”

“She loves me, as do you, Judas,” Jesus replied.  “Her evil is my burden.  Go quickly, for I must see her in the darkness. Do not tell the others, for I would not put my own weight upon their hearts.”

Casting aside his fear as best as possible, Judas went into the village. The other disciples, knowing that Judas carried the purse, assumed that he went to purchase food, and asked no questions. Darkness was falling swiftly, chilling the air and silencing the sounds of life. Judas’ heart hammered wildly, and his footsteps quickened.  It was nearly the ninth hour when he came across Mary, seated in a garden and watching the night — as though expecting him.

“Hello, Judas,” she called out, beckoning him closer.

“Why are you abroad, alone, on such a night?  Has your master no use for you?”

“He has sent me for you, Lady, though I know not why,” Judas replied. Her presence drew him like a magnet, calling out to his senses.  His skin heated, and he blushed.

“Do you fear me, Judas?”  She asked, no smile in her eyes.

“Lady, I do,” he replied, avoiding her eyes.  “Will you come? He is waiting.”

“If he calls, I will come,” she answered, rising with a rustle of linen that melted Judas’ loins.  “But I tell you, Judas, for my sake he risks everything, and I am saddened, for I, too, love him.”

“I pray thee, Mary,” Judas burst out, spinning to brave the depths of her eyes, “do not come.  Stay away from him.  I fear for him, and I fear you.”

She smiled then, but he felt no trace of sincere emotion from her heart.  He froze in shock at the hunger of her gaze, the misery so obvious in the expression of her face. It was bitter, overwhelming, threatening to swallow him. Then she averted her eyes, and she began walking.  He could only follow.

When they were near to where Jesus lay, he bid her wait, and, entering the camp, he came to his master and spoke. “She has come, Lord; I have left her just beyond the camp.”

“It is good,” Jesus replied, rising.  “Tell any who asks that I am in the desert, praying.  Do not fear for me, Judas, for I have said, it is not yet my time.  Fear instead for Mary, for I am not certain of her fate.”

And Jesus walked into the shadows, leaving Judas alone to kneel and pray.

She waited for him in shadows, watching him approach with hooded eyes. His steps were firm and steady, and a glow encased his features. She trembled as she felt the brush of his nearness, cowering deeper into the blackness.

“Mary,” he commanded, stopping and staring unerringly into the darkness, “come forth, for the time is upon us that I must begin to bear your burden.”

She wanted to break free, to run, but she was his to command, and she could not.  He stood, arms wide, waiting, and he beckoned her forth.  She came, haltingly at first, then rushing–blowing across the sand like a dark wind, and they embraced.

“I will take from you your hunger,” he whispered, cupping her face in his hands and staring into her eyes in love, “and you shall have a part of what is mine, that you may be saved.”

“You cannot know what he will do!  Your father will not be pleased!” She pleaded with him, even as he directed her, placing her lips to his throat and caressing her teeth with his skin.

“My father’s will be done,” he said, eyes brimming with trapped emotion, “I will not allow any to suffer.  Drink, Mary, for the hour is late, and my days here are now few.”

And the hunger swept aside her objections as he spoke. She plunged her fangs deep, drank richly of his lifeblood, weeping as she fed, and he moaned from the pain, yet caressed her hair softly, eyes closed in prayer.

Watching from nearby, Judas shrank away in horror. Rushing to the camp, he looked about wildly for his weapons, waking the others in his frantic haste.

“What is it?” Peter asked, grabbing his arm. “Where is our Lord?”

“He is in the desert!” Judas cried, “beset by a demon! We must go to him!”

And they all rushed out then, some only partially clothed, bearing swords and spears.  Judas led them quickly through the shadows to where he had seen Jesus and Mary. When they arrived, however, they found only their Lord, seated, head bowed in prayer.

“Master,” Peter cried, “Judas said that you were beset by a demon, so we have come to you!” Looking up, eyes very tired and voice weak, Jesus answered. “There is no demon here, but I am weary.  Lead me to the camp, for I must rest.”

Eyes full of wonder, for they had never seen their Lord in such a state, they raised him between them and carried him to his bed, where he fell asleep immediately.  In the shadows behind them, weeping, yet marveling at her near-human skin and the peace in her heart, Mary watched them go.  Turning, she ran back to the village.  The night swallowed her quickly, and the desert was once more still.

***

Judas 21:1

1 When he had finished praying, Jesus left with his disciples and crossed the Kidron valley.
2 On the other side was an olive grove, and Jesus and his disciples entered it.
3 Judas, sent to the village for food, met with the woman, Mary of Magdalene, and was delayed in coming to the grove.
4 As he neared the place, he saw Peter in conference with several armed men.
5 The soldiers, accompanied by officials from the Priests and Pharisees, entered the grove just after Judas, who bore a message from Mary. 
6 Kissing his master on the cheek, he whispered the words he had been given. 
7 Then the soldiers stepped forward and the disciples grew silent.
8 “Who is it you seek?” Jesus asked, knowing all that would come to pass. 
9 “Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied.
10 “I am he,” Jesus said.
11 Peter, attempting to hide his betrayal, drew his sword and struck the High Priest’s servant, severing his ear.  (The servant’s name was Malchus)
12 Jesus said, “Put that sword away. Shall I deny the cup my father pours me?”
13 Turning to the Pharisees and soldiers, Jesus said, “Am I leading a rebellion, then, that you need come upon me by stealth, with swords and clubs? 
14 I sat teaching in your courtyards every day, yet you did not arrest me. 
15 This has come about that the prophecies may be fulfilled.”
16 Then all his disciples deserted him and fled.

***

In great anger, Judas followed Peter in his flight. When they reached a point far enough away from the soldiers for safety, he grabbed his fellow disciple’s shoulder, spinning him roughly.

“What have you done, Peter?”  He demanded.  Peter’s eyes were haunted, distant, and Judas recoiled from them in horror.

“He looked well in chains, do you not think so?” The voice was cold, like brittle ice, cracking through the air.  It was not Peter’s voice, nor was it any human expression that rode the familiar features.

“Who are you?” Judas asked, backing away, “You are not Peter!”

“I am more than your mind can grasp, fool,” the demon voice chuckled, “more than even your master imagines. Perhaps he is coming to some knowledge of this, even now!”

Lowering his gaze to avoid the eyes, which glittered with unnatural light and gripped at his heart, Judas began to pray. The demon, jeering and dark, ranted at him, giving no reprise. Steeling himself, Judas ignored the voice, falling to his knees in the sand.

“Our father, who art in heaven,” he began, “be with your servant in his hour of need. Free my brother from this evil, return to us Simon, called Peter, for our Lord needs us now, your son, unworthy as we are, and I have not the strength alone.”

As his courage grew, he rose, raising his eyes to those of his tormentor, searching for his brother.

“You are too weak.” the demon’s voice seemed to waver. “I leave of my own will, not that of your accursed father, or his six-mothered bastard.  And I leave you a gift. Your brethren will believe you the cause of your master’s death. Your kiss will become the symbol of his betrayal!”

“Get thee hence!” Judas staggered forward, as if his physical presence alone could intimidate the evil confronting him.  Peter’s features contorted, rippled between despairing, imploring humanity, and gripping, snarling darkness. As Judas’s fingers touched Peter’s shoulders, there was a sound like the rushing of a great wind, and they were both struck to the ground.  When the demon had passed, leaving swirling pillars of sand in its wake, they rose slowly, blinking their eyes and checking their bones.

“We must follow our Lord, for they have taken him,” Judas said, turning away. Peter watched him, a glare in his eye. His expression, accusing and dark, was more painful than even the demon’s gaze had been, for it shone through the disciple’s own features, and rose from his own mind. Judas trembled, remembering the words, “Your kiss will become the symbol of his betrayal.”

Peter followed, but did not speak.  The ominous weight of his silence bore down upon Judas like a smothering fog, but still he walked on. It was a small price, he told himself, for his brother’s soul…  Tears burned with the swirling sand down his cheeks, and dried instantly, wisping into the eye of the sun.

***

Judas 25:17

17 The soldiers took Jesus into their charge.  Carrying upon his shoulder his own cross, he went out to Golgotha (called the place of the skull)
18 Here they crucified him, along with two others–one to each side, with Jesus in the middle.
19 Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read:
JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS.
20 It was lettered in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, and many Jews read the sign, for the place of the crucifixion was near the city.
21 The Chief Priests of the Jews protested, saying, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but instead that this man claimed to be the King of the Jews.”
22 Pilate answered, “I have written what I have written.”
23 When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four equal shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. 
24 This remaining garment was without seams, woven in one piece.
25 “Let’s not tear it,” they said to one another.  “Let’s decide by lot who will get it.”
26 This happened that the Scripture might be fulfilled which said,
‘They divided my garments among them
And cast lots for my clothing.’
29 So this is what the soldiers did.
30 Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 
31 When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved, (Peter), and she for whom he wept, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”
32 To Mary Magdalene he said, “You are one with my heart.  Though my father calls, I will be with you. Do not forget.”
33 From that time on, the disciple took Jesus’ mother into his home.
34 Mary Magdalene, hearing the Lord’s words, wept bitterly, unable to stand his pain.

***

Darkness fell upon the threefold wooden frames, trailing shadowy tendrils among the rivulets of blood that clotted and grew sticky on his skin.  Jesus regarded those below in the weaving, half-coalesced vision of his pain. Tears dried, unwilling to remoisten his cheeks.  He remained conscious only through continuous, jumbled prayer, chasing the tumbling words and thoughts through his heart and pressing them outward to his father with all the strength of his will. None answered. It was done.  He’d dared to presume himself above his father’s disfavor, reached out to one beyond his power, and he’d given of the greatest gift he’d received to one beyond redemption–desecrating himself in the eyes of his own father.

He could feel his strength ebbing.  The pain was beyond anything he’d experienced before, beyond even the pain of his father’s disapproval.  The human body he wore neared death, and it spoke of this eloquently.  So hard, he thought, such a weight to bear. How do they retain faith? And what have I done, taking my gift of salvation and flinging it aside as if it were mine alone?

“I…I am thirsty,” he croaked at last, beseeching those below.

A plant stem was raised, topped by a sponge, and he greedily sucked on the moistness, feeling the bitter sting as the wine-vinegar trickled down his parched throat. Pulling his face from the sponge weakly, he raised his eyes to the sky and cried out, hurling the words from deep inside his breast, calling out loudly.

“My father, why have you forsaken me?”

And life slipped from his body at that moment, leaving him limp and unmoving on the skeletal framework of the cross.

Mary, seeing that it was truly death that was upon him, screamed a terrible scream, an impotent, nerve-grinding wail to a God she could not reach.  Those around her fled from her fury, crying out in fear and racing for homes and fires. She paid them no heed.

He had risked it all, all that he was, for her, for her soul, and the risk had been in vain–he was dead!  He had walked the Earth as the Son of God, but, having given to her of his gift, having fed her a part of himself, he had died as a man, and all he had lived was wiped away as if it had never been. In that instant, prophecy was cast to the winds without thought. Still screaming, she ran to the desert, pulling at her almost human hair and cursing the sky with raging torrents of unchecked emotion.  Deep within her, sparked by her loss of control, a dark voice reached out to her, laughing the mocking laughter of the victor.

Unable to go on, she dropped to her knees, and, fighting back the encroaching darkness in her soul, she began–for the first time since her feet touched the earth — to pray, loudly and blindly. He had given himself for her, for her salvation, though it cost the world. She prayed for only the chance to return his love, to replace his gift.  She continued to pray, unaware of her surroundings, while a glowing figure appeared at her side. She did not notice that she was not alone until his fingers brushed her shoulder.

Stifling a cry, she backed away, half-rising to her feet. Elijah stood before her, resplendent, but with sorrow beyond comprehension on his features–sadness beyond measure.

“Woman, now called Mary,” he spoke, “would you truly return the light?”

“I…,” she lowered her eyes, bowing in supplication, “I would release to you my soul to return him–to fulfill his prophecy. I would do anything.”

“Go you then” the voice instructed, “and find Judas, who they name betrayer.  Tell him all.  In his lifeblood, and in his love, you will find the strength.  If you willingly replace the gift of the Son of Man with Judas’ mortal blood, your curse will return. In that hour shall all be righted…go and may we all be judged on a standard such as your love.”

The light was gone, the darkness remained, and Mary rose, returning through the sifting shadows to the cross. Tears streamed steadily down her cheeks, dampening the locks of her hair, and her steps were uneven.  It was too great a cost. She had been granted that which no other could give a second time, and now it was demanded of her to return it…she clutched her arms tightly to her stomach to ease the churning and the pain. In her mind, echoing voices mocked her feeble will, laughed at her lack of courage. Already Lucifer and his minions counted the victory won. She was lost to them, but The Christ was lost to mankind.  Wailing her despair, she ran on, finding Judas just before the dawning sun rose to the horizon.  He knelt alone, lost in prayer of his own.  He did not see her coming, and she watched him for a long moment before speaking.

***

Judas 28:1

1 And Judas Iscariot, blamed of the betrayal, prayed in the darkness.
2 The temptress, she called Mary Magdalene, came upon him, wild of eye, and cheeks damp with tears, crying out, “Judas, beloved or our Lord, a great evil has come upon us.”
3 “Lady,” Judas replied, “in three days our Lord shall rise from his grave, redemption is at hand.”
4 “He is dead,” she told him, seating herself, “of love for me, he sacrificed all.  We bear the weight, you and I, for I have spoken with Elijah, and he has sent me to you.”
5 And she spoke to him of Lucifer, and of her curse, and of Jesus’ gift of life, with its terrible price. 
6 They wept, clinging to one another, and Judas cried out, “The weight is too great on you, Mary, for he would not wish you to pay this price!”
7 “That,” she replied, “is why I must pay it.”
8 “Then take me,” Judas lay back, baring his throat, tears in his own eyes, “for truly your love rivals even his, and his gift is too precious to lose.”
9 Seeing the love in Judas’s eyes, feeling the wrench of Satan’s very claws as he leapt to prevent her, the woman, Mary, fell upon the body of Judas and fed, the curse taking her even as she swept forward. Weeping, she cast herself willingly to the darkness from which she’d been raised, feeling the icy claws of the hunger that would once again consume her. 
10 Sated, she rose, and Judas also, now pale and alight with hunger of his own, and they fled as Lucifer hunted them, possessed of a great and futile rage.
11 As darkness engulfed them, they shared one last glance–a last time they smiled. 12 Then it was black, and they were smitten with the fire of Lucifer, losing all thought.

***

When Mary and Judas regained consciousness, they both awoke to hunger. Fighting it back, screaming inwardly with the fire of their need, they walked, side by side, through twilight three days beyond Jesus’ death. Silence filled the night. All those who lived nearby either slept, or were sitting home. They reached the place where Jesus’ tomb lay without meeting a soul, coming to stand by the huge stone that had blocked his return to the world. A fear gnawed at the depth their breasts, nearly smothered, but burning still.

Standing within, gazing at them through haloed prisms, formed of the brilliance of his glory, seen through the mirrors of his tears, the Son of Man regarded them with great sadness, and endless love. Their own eyes, devoid of natural light, flickered with the pain of loss, and the wonder of the intensity of his love. No word did they speak, only awaited their fate and drank in the sight of their Lord.

“Though I suffer not your curse, I will be with you,” Jesus spoke. “A time will come when I walk these roads again–you will be there, and I will remember.” 

 Turning, Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot, called traitor, fled into the darkness, overcome with hunger and pain, tethered in the cutting bonds of evil.  Alone once more, Jesus stood, weeping tears of glittering sadness to wet the sand at his feet. They blurred his sight. Time was so short. He could not follow them, could do nothing but accept their sacrifice. It should have been his alone.  He turned, walking forth to embrace the world.

***

Judas: 30

1 Running from the tomb, where Jesus stood, resurrected, Judas stole a length of rope from a nearby home. 
2 Coming upon a tall tree, he cast it upon a sturdy branch.
3 Putting to the end of the rope a noose, he climbed to a branch high above the ground, fixed the rope to his neck, and leapt, hanging himself.
4 Finding him thus, the people spoke against him, led by Simon, called Peter, saying, “He has taken his life from shame, for he betrayed his Lord.”
5 Mary Magdalene, running to where the disciples were gathered, said, “I have seen the Lord, and he is risen.”
6 And Jesus appeared other times to his disciples, speaking words of comfort and salvation, and was raised once more to his throne in Heaven.
7 We, who hunger, remain. 
8 The rope has failed to relieve me of my burden. 
9 In the bark of the tree where we left the rope, Mary inscribed the words, “Here hung one who loves beyond life.”
10 May God forgive us.”

* * *

This preview was provided by and posted with the express permission of David Niall Wilson

A TASTE OF BLOOD AND ROSES is available for the Kindle at Amazon.com, or in PDF and EPUB formats at DriveThruHorror.com.

Related posts:

1. The Girls with Games of Blood Chapter Preview
2. This is My Blood Fiction Review
3. This is My Blood Preview

]]> http://www.flamesrising.com/taste-of-blood-roses-preview/feed/ 0 http://www.flamesrising.com/girls-games-blood-preview/ http://www.flamesrising.com/girls-games-blood-preview/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:45:23 +0000 Flames http://www.flamesrising.com/?p=8402 Listen to what I tell you, son, every word is true The sisters haunt the night, and might fight over you Nothing can steal your soul and stamp it in the mud Like being the new play-pretty for the girls with the games of blood . . . The old song warns of the beautiful Bolade sisters, Patience and Prudence, whose undying rivalry was said to stretch even beyond the grave. But Count Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski has never heard the song. A suave Continental vampire, staked to death more than sixty years ago, he has risen to stalk the Southern nights of Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1975. Although new to the modern world, he has quickly developed a taste for its hot blood, willing women, and high-speed automobiles. Alex Bledsoe, author of Blood Groove, returns to he world of the undead with a tale of fast cars and vengeance that never dies. . . . Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of The Girls with Games of Blood. Related posts:

1. A Taste of Blood and Roses Preview
2. Blood Groove Chapter One Preview
3. Blood Games II Review

]]>

Listen to what I tell you, son, every word is true
The sisters haunt the night, and might fight over you
Nothing can steal your soul and stamp it in the mud
Like being the new play-pretty for the girls with the games of blood . . .

The old song warns of the beautiful Bolade sisters, Patience and Prudence, whose undying rivalry was said to stretch even beyond the grave. But Count Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski has never heard the song. A suave Continental vampire, staked to death more than sixty years ago, he has risen to stalk the Southern nights of Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1975. Although new to the modern world, he has quickly developed a taste for its hot blood, willing women, and high-speed automobiles.

Yet the seventies are not without their perils, even for so cunning and ruthless a predator. Zginski’s insistent pursuit of a cherry 1973 Mach 1 Ford Mustang soon brings him into conflict with a legendary redneck sheriff with a short temper and a big baseball bat. His dangerous fascination with an enticing undead chanteuse and her equally seductive sister, threatens not only his own ageless existence, but that of the small group of modern-day vampires he has grudgingly taken under his wing. Zginski has already escaped limbo once, but can he free himself from the tangled web of the girls who play games of blood?

Alex Bledsoe, author of Blood Groove, returns to he world of the undead with a tale of fast cars and vengeance that never dies. . . .

Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of this new novel.

The Girls with Games of Blood Chapter One

Memphis, Tennessee, late summer 1975

“Shit,” the man said as he leaned his chin on his hand. He looked at the girl behind the bar and said doubtfully, “Are you sure you’re old enough to be serving alcohol?”

She smiled as she dried a beer mug and placed it on the shelf in line with the others. Her canine teeth protruded ever so slightly over her lower lip. “Oh, I’m a lot older than I look, I promise.”

“Ah, these days, everyone looks young to me,” he said sadly. He wore his long hair feathered back in the current style, and a wide-lapelled, powder-blue jacket. He was about ten years too old for the look, though, and it seemed more like a costume on him than real clothes. He radiated weary discomfort with his very skin. “I feel positively ancient.”

“I know the feeling,” the girl agreed as she tossed the rag into the sink. In the empty, almost silent bar the PLOP echoed off the wood paneling. The girl’s shiny metal name tag read Fauvette; soft, shoulder-length brown hair framed a face unlined and untroubled. Only her eyes convinced the man that she was indeed over the legal age of twenty-one. They had the haunted air of someone who’d seen awful things and would never fully forget them.

The man fluttered the front of his paisley-spotted polyester shirt. “This heat’s murder, too. I guess a summer drought is normal around here, but you wouldn’t think it’d be so humid without actually raining.”

“There’s the big river right down the road,” she pointed out. “And it is the South.”

“Yes,” he said dourly. “The cradle of soul, and rock and roll. And if my luck is any indication, also their grave.”

“So what do you do for a living that’s got you so morbid this afternoon?” she said.

“I’m in the record business. I travel the country to find new talent, then sign them to contracts that suck the life right out of them. Can you believe that?”

“You don’t sound like you enjoy it very much.”

“That’s because I never find what I’m looking for. The song. The face. The voice.”

“Always a new one, eh?”

“Oh, no. I found it once, eight years ago, out in California. Heard the song, saw the face, felt the voice. But I let it slip away.” He paused for a sip of his drink. “I know people always dump on bartenders, sweetheart. But beauty like yours deserves deference, don’t you think? So I’ll shut up if you want.”

She made a face. “I think I heard a compliment in there somewhere. Thanks.” She looked around the otherwise empty bar. It was too late for the lunch crowd, too early for dinner, and she had nothing better to do. Besides, since taking this job she’d found that she enjoyed hearing people’s stories. It gave her a sense of being connected to the world again. “And you can tell me anything. Just don’t think I’m rude if we get another customer and I have to step away.”

“I admire your work ethic,” he said. “Well, this was in San Francisco, back during the days of Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love. Does that mean anything to you?”

“I’ve heard of San Francisco.”

He laughed. Pretty girls with wry senses of humor were always his weakness. “The whole world felt like it was changing….”

***

…and if there was an epicenter, it was there. I had contacts everywhere, in all the clubs and bars and radio stations. I was always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. But I only truly found it once. It started with a Polaroid snapshot that I held so the marquee’s neon light fell on it. “I don’t know,” I said skeptically. “She looks like a chunky Morticia Addams.”

“Oh, be nice,” Andre said. As manager for the city’s top underground radio station, he had tipped me off to some fairly successful acts in the past: the Thermodynamic Kiwis and Todd Slaughter’s Band of Otters were our most recent signees. My reputation at the label, though, would not survive a spectacular blunder made just on Andre’s say-so. Besides, as the ranking hippie-in-residence, I knew my job depended on judging not just what was hot now, but what the kids would be listening to in six months’ time over their bonfires of draft cards and brassieres.

“It’s nothing personal, I’m just kind of burned out on sensitive folk singers,” I said. “If I hear one more Joan Baez sermon, I’ll jump off a bridge. Besides, I think the trend is fading. I heard Dylan’s even playing an electric guitar.”

“But this girl is incredible,” Andre said earnestly. “I’ve never heard anything like her. She may not look like much in that photo, but she’s the grooviest thing in the world onstage.”

I looked at the picture again. The girl was in her early twenties, with long black hair parted in the middle. She had heavy eyebrows and wore dark lipstick. Her face was pleasantly round, and her black sleeveless dress showed pudgy upper arms. There was an appealing black-and-white starkness to her, in direct contrast to the multicolored psychedelia around us.

I checked my watch. The girl’s first set began in fifteen minutes inside the Human Bean, the city’s trendiest coffeehouse, which is why Andre dragged me down here. I sighed. “Okay, Andre, you win. I’ll check her out. But she better be the grooviest thing in the world, or you owe me a nickel bag and a date with that receptionist of yours.”

It was a time when everything seemed alive, and not just because of all the acid we were taking. The very air rippled with possibility, laced with an energy to which we all contributed, and from which we all partook. And on that night, the streets were even more filled than usual with tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottoms, dilated pupils, and the sense of impending destiny. So what happened shouldn’t have been that surprising.

The Human Bean–a tiny room packed with round tables and wooden chairs, a mahogany bar across one wall, and a shallow stage along the opposite one–smelled of java and grass. Multicolored shirts glowed in the black lights, and strobes flickered in the corners. The face of Jimi Hendrix, as big as a Volkswagen, watched beneficently from a wall mural behind the bar. In front of the small stage, several kids sat cross-legged and swayed to music only they heard, or that was contained in the joints they passed around.

Someone handed one to me as we settled in at our table, and I took a sociable toke. Andre did likewise, and I ordered a beer and a bag of chips to offset the munchies I always got if I even looked sideways at marijuana. As the waitress returned with our order, the room grew dark and the stage lights came up.

The crowd applauded as the performer walked to the straight-backed chair placed at center stage. Just as in the Polaroid, she wore a short black sleeveless dress, black boots, and big earrings. She dramatically tossed her long hair behind her shoulders, arranged a capo on her guitar, and finally looked out at the audience with a mischievous little grin.

“They call me Patience,” she said seriously as she settled into the chair. Her voice was deep and full, with an unmistakable Southern twang. “Do you know why? Because I’ve got a lot of it. But be careful.” Then she smiled, and something seemed to radiate from her directly into me, like an electrical cord plugged into an outlet. “That’s a lot of patience to lose.”

The crowd woozily cheered. Then she strummed her guitar and began to sing.

The songs she performed weren’t important. The essential thing was that this slightly overweight dark-eyed chick had me, and the whole audience, riveted. In all my years as a passable musician, then as a much better talent scout, I had never experienced anything like it. Not Elvis, not the Stones, not even the Beatles commanded attention to this degree. On an emotional level the performance left me and everyone else drained.

But despite this, I noticed two things about Patience.

One was that after her initial comments she hardly spoke to the audience or even acknowledged it. She stayed superfocused on her music.

The other was that despite the cramped, overheated and underventilated club, she did not sweat.

***

Fauvette’s eyebrows rose. “She didn’t sweat? How close were you sitting?”

He smiled with the wistfulness of recalled youth. “Ah, you should get out more. The best music is always found in places without air conditioning, where the heat makes you want to undress and the music makes you want to dance.”

“I guess I’m sheltered,” she said with a wry grin. “But you could really tell she wasn’t sweating?”

“Yeah. It was strange enough I still remember it. Anyway, after the show….”

***

…I knocked on the dressing room door. I was so exhausted I could barely walk, but since I depended on commissions and signing bonuses, I also had a serious work ethic. “Hello?” I said, stifling a yawn, and pushed the door open without waiting for an answer.

I stopped in the doorway. Patience, naked except for a black towel wrapped around hair still wet from the shower, sat with her feet propped on an upside-down trash can. The only light came from scented candles. The dressing room was so tiny her toes almost touched my shins, but like most kids of that time and place, she wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about her nudity. It was provocative only in the sense that it challenged the mores of the square world.

She blew a smoke ring from a Mexican cigarillo and regarded me coolly. “Hello,” she said in the same throaty drawl.

“Would you like me to close the door?” I asked.

She shrugged. “If it makes you feel less…vulnerable.” Then she smiled, cold amusement twinkling in her eyes.

I managed to shut the door behind me, then handed her a business card. “Hi. I caught your show tonight and –-” Another yawn struck me. “Sorry, for some reason I’m just beat. Anyway, I really dug it, I thought you were outstanding. Do you have a manager?”

She turned the card over in her fingers. Her nails were painted a shade of dark magenta. “I don’t have much to manage. What there is, I can handle.” She took another drag on the cigarillo. I was fairly used to being around naked girls–that’s why I originally got into music, after all–so I kept my eyes on her strictly from her neck up. Finally she said, “So you want to make me a star, is that it?”

Despite her apparent youth, she had the demeanor of someone older and much shrewder. I mentally shifted from my usual “naïve young chick” spiel to the one I used on other professionals. “No, only the public can do that. But I think I can make you and me some money, and would love to get you into a studio as soon as possible. Do you have demos of any of your songs?”

She stubbed out the cigarillo in an ashtray on the floor, put her feet down, and sat forward until her breasts touched her knees. “I’m not completely sure what I do can be captured on vinyl.”

“It can with the right producer,” I said, and yawned again. “You could be the next Joan Baez, or even the next Dylan.” And I yawned again.

She smiled. “Tired?”

“Very. Your show just sucked all the life out of me. In a good way, of course,” I added with a laugh.

She slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m really not interested. Music is just sort of a minor obsession for me right now. A kind of experiment.” She lightly rested her fingers on the strings of her guitar, propped next to the chair. “But I’ll tell you a secret. The first time I saw myself in the mirror holding a guitar was the first time I was able to stand what I saw there in a very long time.” She looked back up at me and smiled. “No amount of money or success can really compete with that feeling. Can it?”

Oh, God, I thought, an artiste. If I hadn’t been so tired I might have been more persuasive, pointing out that even Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger had to eat, but I wasn’t up to it at that moment. “Will you keep my card, then? In case you change your mind?”

She nodded. “Yes. But I won’t.”

I turned to leave, and stopped in the doorway. “Miss…Patience, I just want to say in all sincerity, I think you are a phenomenal performer. I attend concerts for a living, and yours was the best, most intense one I’ve ever seen. Even if you don’t sign with me, I’ll still be a fan.”

She looked at me oddly, as if this had unaccountably moved her. “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“My pleasure,” I said. And I meant it.

Two days later I sat in an exclusive French restaurant, the only guy in the place with hair past my ears, and examined the folder of information that the record label’s private detective dug up on Miss high-and-mighty Patience. There wasn’t much, and it didn’t take long to look it over.

According to the lease on her house, her full name was Patience Bolade. A year earlier, she’d taken some poetry classes at the local university, and worked in an off-campus bookstore. The most amazing thing was that she started performing music in public within two weeks of purchasing her guitar, only four months ago. Wow.

And that was all. He found no information on her family, or where she went to high school, or anything. She simply appeared out of nowhere.

The only other bit was that, in the “emergency contact” blank on her lease, she had written the name Prudence Bolade, but provided no phone number. He said that coincidentally, there was an old country song about two sisters with the very same names, who both died for the love of a scoundrel.

I found the song he mentioned, an old standard recorded in 1957 by Slack Whitside, the Singing Switchman. The album cover showed him seated on a train’s cowcatcher with a guitar and a phony gap-toothed smile. Apparently he was as much a comedian as a singer, but he performed the song in question completely straight.

“There was two girls by the name of Bolade

No prettier sisters God never made

One dark like midnight, one bright like the sun

But between them a hate to make Satan hisself run….”

The rest of the song, based on a true story from his native Tennessee, told how Patience Bolade killed herself when she found her lover in her sister’s arms. Then Patience’s ghost returned, to drive Prudence to suicide. But their restless spirits still haunted the night, and the song concluded with a warning:

“Listen to what I tell you, son, every word is true

The sisters haunt the night, and might fight over you

Nothing can steal your soul and stamp it in the mud

Like being the new play-pretty for the girls with games of blood.”

***

Fauvette said, “I’ve heard that song. Something about ‘She put a bullet through her broken heart’?”

He nodded. “‘She put a bullet through her broken heart, to spite the ones betraying her/But her soul, seeking the Pearly Gates, found her hatred was delaying her.’”

“My mama used to sing me that,” she said, looking down at a spot on the bar. She grabbed a cloth and polished it clean. “I hadn’t thought about it in a long time.”

“I take it your mama’s not around anymore?” he said sympathetically.

She shook her head, then smiled. “Ah, but that’s a dull story. Yours is fascinating. So what did you do?”

“I found out that Patience only played the Human Bean one night a week….”

***

…and no one at the club had any idea what she did with the rest of her time. She also had no listed phone number. So late that afternoon I drove down her street, parked my car at the derelict church next door, and sneaked through the weed-infested cemetery to get a better look at her house.

I saw no sign of life, or even recent habitation. I scotch-taped a Xerox reproduction of the song lyrics to the front door, along with the admonition to meet me at the Human Bean that night.

I waited at the coffeehouse, breathed its pot-saturated air, and ate five packs of Twinkies, two bags of chips and all the peanuts the waitress could find. And at sunset, just as the college crowd began to drift in, I looked up and saw Patience Bolade next to me.

“Hi,” I said, and stood. She watched me with a neutral expression. “Sorry, if I don’t stand when a lady approaches my table, my mother turns in her grave. Would you like to sit down?”

She wore almost the same outfit, a simple black sleeveless dress and big dangly earrings that looked like Christmas tree ornaments. She sat in the offered chair, back straight, hands in her lap.

I lit a cigarette–a regular one–and offered the pack to her, but she shook her head. “I never smoke…cigarettes,” she said, and after a moment added, “So how did you find out about me?”

“Well, to be honest, I used a private detective.”

She nodded. “I see.” She closed her eyes and her shoulders sagged a little. “I guess I should be relieved. I knew it couldn’t last, that if I did it long enough, someone would notice. Still, I hate to see it end.”

“See what end?”

She gestured at the coffeehouse. “This. This…sanctuary. In the time I’ve been playing here, no one has had to die. If I write the songs well enough, and perform them with enough honesty, I can live off the energy of the crowd. It’s such a relief not to have to be–” and she shuddered at the thought “–bloodthirsty. You have no idea.”

“Apparently not,” I agreed. “Just what are you talking about?”

She stared at me. “I…what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about signing you to my label.”

She sat very still for a long moment. “Wait…what do you think that song means? ‘The Girls with Games of Blood’?”

I shrugged. “Hell, honey, I don’t think it means a thing. You want to name yourself after a dead girl, dress in black, and sing songs about how miserable you are, that’s great. It might even start a trend. All I know is, your effect on a crowd is amazing, and I think you, and me, and my company can all make an awful lot of money.”

She leaned close to me, and her full lips turned up with just the hint of a smile. “You’re serious, aren’t you? That’s all you’re interested in.”

“It’s my job.”

Now she really grinned. “Yes. It surely is. But I’m afraid my previous answer has to stand. What I do can’t be broken down into vinyl grooves or magnetic tape strips.” She stood and offered her hand. “Thank you for your kind words. I wish you luck.”

I took her hand. It was ice-cold. Then she left, swallowed by the hazy night. And neither I nor anyone else ever saw Patience Bolade again.

***

The story finished, he watched Fauvette for a reaction. The girl’s face was impassive, but neither amused nor doubtful. He’d expected to be gently mocked, as he was every other time he told the story. “So,” he said after a moment, “what do you think?”

“I think you were probably well shed of her,” Fauvette said.

He looked at his watch, sighed, and put some bills on the counter. “The Next Big Thing waits for no man. Thanks for listing to me…Foovette?”

“FAW-vette,” she corrected.

“Fauvette. Hope to see you again soon.”

He stood and walked out of the empty bar. When he opened the door, afternoon sunlight blasted in, overcoming the air-conditioning with no effort. Fauvette instinctively winced and looked away, even though she knew by now that sunlight was nothing to fear. Old habits died hard, and hers were older than most.

She bent to retrieve a fallen stack of napkins, which took several moments after she dropped them a second time. When she stood the door opened again and a woman carrying a guitar case was silhouetted against the sun, her long hair swaying as she looked around.

“You’re letting out the air conditioning,” Fauvette called.

“Oh. Sorry,” the woman said, and stepped inside. She walked to the bar, propped the guitar case against it, and climbed onto a stool. “Is the manager in?”

Fauvette started to answer, then stopped. The woman appeared to be in her early twenties, with long black hair parted in the middle. She had heavy eyebrows and wore dark lipstick. Her face was pleasantly round, and a low-cut peasant blouse showed white cleavage and pudgy upper arms. And despite the heat outside, she showed no signs of sweat.

The woman frowned uneasily at the scrutiny. “Is something wrong?”

“Did you see the man who just left? In the baby-blue leisure suit?”

“No. Why?”

Fauvette bit her lip thoughtfully before speaking. “This is a weird question, but is your name by any chance…Patience?”

“Yes,” the woman said guardedly. “Do we know each other?”

Fauvette leaned her elbows on the bar and rested her chin on her hands. For a long moment the two women looked at each other. What they saw went beyond their mutual gender, and into the realm of unmistakable recognition that comes when one vampire recognizes another.

“Do you believe,” Fauvette said at last, “in absolutely out-of-this-world, mind-boggling coincidence?”

* * * *

This preview was provided by and posted with express permission of Alex Bledsoe.

The Girls with Games of Blood is available now at Amazon.com.

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]]> http://www.flamesrising.com/girls-games-blood-preview/feed/ 0 http://www.flamesrising.com/galenorn-bone-magic-preview/ http://www.flamesrising.com/galenorn-bone-magic-preview/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:09:24 +0000 Flames http://www.flamesrising.com/?p=8102 Another equinox is here, and life's getting more tumultuous for the D'Artigo sisters. Smoky, the dragon of Camille's dreams, must choose between his family and her. Plus, the sisters can't locate the new demon general in town. And Camille's summoned to Otherworld, thinking she'll reunite with her long-lost soul mate Trillian. But once there, she must undergo a drastic ritual that will forever change her and those she loves. Flames Rising is pleased to present you with an excerpt from the first chapter of BONE MAGIC, which was written by Yasmine Galenorn. Related posts:

1. A Brief History of Magic by Michael Jasper
2. Chapter Preview of Demon Mistress by Yasmine Galenorn
3. Blood Groove Chapter One Preview

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Another equinox is here, and life’s getting more tumultuous for the D’Artigo sisters. Smoky, the dragon of Camille’s dreams, must choose between his family and her. Plus, the sisters can’t locate the new demon general in town. And Camille’s summoned to Otherworld, thinking she’ll reunite with her long-lost soul mate Trillian. But once there, she must undergo a drastic ritual that will forever change her and those she loves.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an excerpt from the first chapter of BONE MAGIC, which was written by Yasmine Galenorn.

Chapter One Excerpt

"Run! Get the hell out of here!" Morio pushed me toward the iron gates.

I didn't ask why. I just took off for the opening, avoiding the metal as I darted past the wrought iron spikes. Nearing the steps leading out of the mausoleum, another shout from Morio stopped me and I whirled around. He'd dropped his bag containing his skull familiar and had pulled out a pair of curved daggers, one in each hand. A wedding present from me, but he wasn't taking any time to admire the carved
antler handles.

No, it was show and tell time.

Two people with long, shuffling strides were headed his way. Or rather, two bodies.

"Can you cut off their heads?"

Morio snorted. "Oh sure. I can just zip on in and lop off their heads with these babies. Get real, woman. We've got our work cut out for us."

"Hey, life would be easier that way," I called out, but he had a point. It wasn't that he couldn't fight. In fact, Morio was an incredible fighter. But we were facing one teensy-weensy problem. Our opponents weren't exactly alive. They were already dead. And dangerous.

One of them was just what he looked like-so much dead meat on the hoof. Normally, returning the zombie to the grave wouldn't be much of a problem-they were shambling brainless monsters. No brains meant for less of a challenge. But we'd made a potentially deadly mistake. His companion was all too aware of our intentions and was whispering something under his breath.

That we'd accidentally chosen a demon's corpse to experiment on didn't help matters. Neither did the fact that we'd summoned a spirit into the body, and that spirit knew how to use magic. Oh yeah, we'd fucked up royally.

As I raced back to his side, Morio leapt into the air, spinning with a kick that landed square on the chest of the first corpse, sending the creature reeling back. The zombie thudded against the wall and slid to the floor. It was still moving, though, and if we'd done our job right, would be back in action in a moment. And it looked like we deserved an A+ for attention to detail. The zombie was struggling to push itself up off the ground.

"Cripes. Now our magic works," I said, torn between being proud of our work and wishing we weren't so damned good. I ran through my repertoire of spells, trying to think of something to help. We had to reverse the summoning spell but in the meantime, what could freeze an angry spirit waltzing around in a demon's body?

Morio sliced through the air, catching one of the creature's arms. He managed to carve off a long strip of the flesh and I grimaced as the chunk o' demon fell to the floor. The zombie reeled as Morio punched him in the jaw. He knocked him back a few steps, but barely put a dent in the monster's speed.

Oh, this was so not how our experiment was supposed to go.

Quick, quick, what could I use? Fire? No, the damn thing was demon and there was a good chance the body was still immune to flame. But what about lightning? I grinned. Electricity just might just work.

I thrust my arms into the air and closed my eyes, summoning the Moon Mother, calling down the lightning. A storm was on the way, so the bolts didn’t have far to travel.

The lightning instantly responded. I could hear it crackling from about five miles away as the clouds raced in, carrying it to me. As the energy began to swirl around my hands, I felt it thicken, shrouding me like a fog. The power soaked into my pores and entered my lungs with the rising mists.

The energy coiled like a snake at the base of my tailbone and began to ascend through my spine, prickling me like a thousand needles, the pain sharp and exquisitely sensual. A rush of desire rode on the back of the bolt-sex and magic were integrally combined for me. I sucked in a deep breath as the spell took over, then arched my back, arms open wide, and pointed my palms toward the demon’s body.

This preview for was provided and published with express permission from Yasmine Galenorn and her publisher. To read the rest of the preview, visit the Chapter One Preview of BONE MAGIC at www.yasminegalenorn.com.

Related posts:

1. A Brief History of Magic by Michael Jasper
2. Chapter Preview of Demon Mistress by Yasmine Galenorn
3. Blood Groove Chapter One Preview

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