by john | Aug 8, 2018 | Promos/Giveaways
To celebrate the release of Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 – Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem, I’ve put ALL the Bubba collections on sale for a limited time. This is a great opportunity for you to catch up on seasons you missed, or just to jump on the crazy train that is Bubba the Monster Hunter,
Here are some details –
Scattered, Smothered, & Chunked – Bubba Season 1 – $2.99
Grits, Guns, & Glory – Bubba Season 2 – $3.99
Wine, Women, & Song – Bubba Season 3 – $4.99
And of course, the newest release in the series – Bubba Season 4 can be pre-ordered here for just $2.99 for a very limited time! Get your orders in early, because this price is sure as hell going up!
by john | May 3, 2018 | Book Spotlight
Zombies Ate My Homework came out this week, and here’s a sample of the book. NSFW, NSFC, NSFAnything. If you aren’t familiar with the Shingles series or Authors & Dragons, you should check those out too. If you dig the sample, buy the book!
Chapter Four
Todd watched the woman stagger toward the bus. She never got any faster, just kept limping along. As she got closer, Todd saw that her left leg wasn’t working quite right, like she was dragging it more than walking on it. She came to another nasty pothole and just faceplanted right there in the road, not even putting her hands out to break her fall.
“Ohhh!” came a shout from a few rows back. Todd peeked back over the seat and realized it was Hank, and he was watching the woman, too.
She just lay there in the street for a few seconds, then started to crawl forward, pulling herself along with her arms. She crawled for a couple of yards, then slowly clambered to her feet and resumed her odd shuffling limp, this time with her jaw hanging off at an odd angle. She didn’t scream, didn’t seem to be crying—she just limped toward them like an old three-legged dog.
“What’s wrong with her, Toddy?” Andy asked, and when Todd turned his face to his little brother, he saw tears welling up in his brother’s eyes. “Is that lady a zombie?”
Todd laughed because what else do you do when your little brother asks you if the woman who just died in a Prius is now a zombie shambling toward the school bus where you’re both trapped? “No, buddy. Zombies aren’t real. She’s just hurt really bad, and we need to help her.”
Todd turned to the front of the bus. “Hey, Skeevy! That lady’s hurt real bad. You oughta take the first aid kit out there and help her.”
Skeevy didn’t even look up from his phone. Todd didn’t know what the driver could be looking at, since nobody had any service, but he was sure engrossed in something. “There’s literally zero chance I’m leaving you hooligans on this bus alone. I’d so totally lose my job for that.”
“Then can me and Tarik go help her? We both took first aid last summer,” Todd called back.
“Dude,” Tarik whispered. “I so flunked that class.”
“I don’t care, man. We need to see what’s up with that lady. She doesn’t look right,” Todd said.
“No way, Todd-zay,” Skeevy called out. “The doors to the bus stay shut up tight until the guys from maintenance get here.”
“How do the guys from maintenance even know how to come find us?” Mikayla asked loudly. “Nobody’s cell phones work.”
“They’ve got GPS on the buses. When we don’t get to the museum, Mr. Moore will call that in, the district will look up our location, and they’ll send help. No worries, little buddies. You just trust ol’ Skeevy.” It bothered Todd a little bit just how much Skeevy embraced his nickname, like it was a compliment or something. In Todd’s experience, nicknames were never a compliment.
As if to prove him right, Hank called out from the back of the bus, “Go ahead, Toad. Go help the nice zombie lady. Maybe she’ll give you a kiss. God knows that’s the only way a girl will kiss you, if she’s already dead!” Hank’s cronies all laughed, and Todd felt his face turn crimson. The embarrassment was all the worse because sitting right there in front of Hank was Tiffany Tarleton, the prettiest girl in seventh grade, laughing just like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. And Mikayla was right. She was wearing a miniskirt.
Todd looked back out the window, happy to see that an ambulance was pulling up to the crash scene and a paramedic was walking over to the woman. The man had his hands out, and Todd could see his lips moving, as if he were offering to help the woman. For a few seconds, she just kept shuffling toward the school bus like she didn’t hear the man, then she stopped in her tracks, whirled around, and leapt on the paramedic, knocking him to the ground.
“Holy shit!” Andy whispered.
Todd smacked him on the back of the head. “Dude, don’t cuss. Dad would kick your butt for that.”
“Yeah, yeah, but look!” Andy pointed at the window, where the woman was sitting astride the paramedic, her face bent down to the man’s. Her hair fell over their faces, obscuring the action. “Todd, please tell me she’s real grateful and she’s giving that guy a kiss.”
“I…” Todd didn’t even have time to get the lie out before the woman turned her face back to the bus and showed them all the gruesome truth. Blood streamed down her face, even down her messed-up jaw, coating the front of her neck all the way down her dress, where pink and white flowers bloomed here and there in a field of bright red.
“Holy shit,” Andy repeated, and this time Todd didn’t smack him. When the little dude was right, he was right.
A scream ripped through the bus, and every eye spun to Tiffany Tarleton, standing on her seat looking out the open window at the woman and all the paramedic blood pouring down her face. “It’s a zombie!” Tiffany screeched.
The woman, as if to confirm the truth of what Tiffany said, lurched back to her feet and started to plod toward the bus again, zeroing in on the exact spot where Tiffany stood and screamed.
“Tiffany, shut up!” Mikayla yelled, scrambling over Tarik and running back to where the terrified girl stood, her scream fading to a high-pitched keening. Mikayla spun the smaller girl around by her long blond curls, and slapped her across the face, her open palm making a crack life a rifle.
Tiffany’s screams cut off like a light switch, and she was instantly returned to a pissy seventh-grader. “You slapped me!” she proclaimed, jamming her fists onto her hips.
“I’ll do it again if you don’t put up that window, sit down, and shut the hell up!” Mikayla raised her voice to address the whole bus. “Everybody, listen to me! You know what’s going on. We’ve all seen enough episodes of The Walking Dead to not screw this up, right? Now put up all of those windows and get back in your seats. If they can’t smell us, or hear us, they won’t even know we’re here.” Mikayla looked around the bus, then called out, “Yes, Andy?”
Todd turned to see his little brother turned completely around in their seat, up on his knees as he leaned over the back of the seat. “What if they’re fast zombies? What if they don’t work like they do in the movies?”
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Mikayla said, sounding very adult for a girl who was still too short to ride all the rides at the amusement parks. “But we know about this stuff, so we’re not going to do the stupid crap we see people do in the movies, right?”
Andy nodded and raised his window with a firm click. Then he pressed his face to the dirty glass and watched as the woman continued her slow march to the bus. After a few seconds, the paramedic sat up, then got to his feet, and Todd saw exactly how much damage had been done to the man. His throat was completely gone, and his uniform shirt was at least as covered in blood as the woman’s dress. He moved better, probably because he hadn’t broken half the bones in his body in a car crash when he died, but he still walked with that funny lurching limp that the woman had. And he was heading for the bus, too.
Todd looked left and right, checking that all the students had their windows up, but when he looked back to the right, he saw Skeevy sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, his head leaned back so his ponytail dangled out the window, puffing on his vape pen and blowing cherry-scented smoke up toward the roof of the bus.
“Skeevy!” Todd hissed, but the driver didn’t respond. “Skeevy!” Todd whispered louder, then noticed that the only adult on the bus had his feet on the lever that controlled the door, flipping it open and shut with a loud squeak every ten seconds or so, while his hair dangled down the side of the bus, twitching back and forth like a fishing lure for the undead, all the while jamming out to something on his candy-apple red BOOMer headphones.
“Son of a…” Todd grumbled as he slid out into the aisle and ran to the front of the bus. He stopped right next to Skeevy, tapping him on the shoulder. Skeevy just slapped his hand away. Todd did it again, harder this time, and Skeevy slapped his hand away and flipped him the bird.
Todd thought about just letting the zombies get the idiot bus driver but decided that no matter how much of a douche he was, he didn’t deserve to get his throat ripped out by the living dead. So, he reached out, grabbed the blond high school senior’s feet, and yanked them off the door lever. Skeevy’s feet dropped to the floor, which made him sit up, and he dropped his vape pen on the floor. When he bent down to pick it up, his ponytail slid back into the bus, just a few seconds before the woman hit the side of the big yellow torture chamber with a hollow thud.
“Dude, what was that for?” Skeevy asked, looking a little pissed.
“Close the window, Skeevy,” Todd said, very proud of himself for keeping calm so far.
“Dude, you’re the passenger. I’m the licensed driver. That means that I make the decisions about what happens in the driver’s seat. So you don’t get to tell me to close the window, how fast to drive, or even where to pick you up. You got that? And you sure as…heck…don’t get to touch me. If you do it again, I’m going to have you suspended for a week. How would you like that, Mr. Assertive?”
“Skeevy,” Todd started, trying to hold on to his calm in the face of the increasingly close thuds along the side of the bus as the female zombie, hearing Skeevy’s rant, moved closer and closer. “Skeevy, I’m sorry I touched you, but you really need to close your window. There’s something really weird going on out there, and it looks like…oh, screw this.” Todd finally got frustrated with staying calm and upon hearing a new thump at the back of the bus where the paramedic finally joined his maker, just clambered over Skeevy and slid the window shut, latching it just as the woman’s blood-covered fingers slapped the glass.
“Dude! You do not get to invade the driver’s personal space like that. I’m sorry, Todd-o, but that’s going to be three days off the bus. Now what was so all-fired important that you had to get all up in my grill like that?”
Todd, back on his feet and standing between Skeevy and the door of the bus, just stepped aside and pointed. “That.”
Outside the door was a dead paramedic, nothing but a gaping wound where his throat used to be, slapping at the door trying to get in. He left bloody tracks wherever he touched the panes of glass in the door, and the streaks of red started to make seeing difficult.
“And that,” Todd said, pointing to Skeevy’s window, where two female hands smacked the glass without rhythm, just tapping a crimson concerto of zombie hunger less than six inches from the tip of Skeevy’s beloved ponytail.
“Dude…” Skeevy drew out the word, so it sounded more like “duuuuuuuuudddddde,” and Todd just nodded.
“Dude,” Todd said, trying very hard to speak a language he knew the bus driver would understand. “There are zombies trying to catch a ride on the school bus. We have to be quiet so they will go away and leave us alone.”
Skeevy nodded, moving his face almost all the way to the window to look at the ruin of the woman’s body who stood outside his bus, her once-environmentally conscious mind now full of nothing but hunger. The driver took it all in: the mindless face, the blood covering her jaw and dress, the hollow, empty eyes, and he turned back to Todd.
“Dude, there are zombies outside my bus,” Skeevy whispered.
Todd just nodded, then whispered back, “We have to be very quiet, so they don’t want to get in.”
Skeevy nodded, then split the air with a high-pitched scream that sounded more like a tortured cat than a terrified high school senior. When his resolve broke, fully half the bus cut loose with shrieks of terror and screams for help at the top of very well-developed young lungs.
Then the real trouble started.
by john | Apr 19, 2018 | Fiction, Harker
Since She Talks to Angels releases today, I thought I’d give you all a sneak peek into the opening of the book, kinda like a tease to get you to go out and buy that shit. Here’s the linky to aforementioned shit.
Chapter 1
“Not a good time, Harker,” I said into my cell phone as I put the Toaster in park. My beat up old Honda Element isn’t sexy, but it’s paid for and has all the cargo room I need for my day job. That day job at the moment had me stashing my panty-dropping grocery grabber at the far end of a parking lot across from The Last Ride, a biker bar on the outskirts of St. Louis. The preferred modes of transportation for the occupants of the bar apparently had at least one, usually two fewer wheels than my Element, but there were a couple of old Detroit-made penis compensation methods in the gravel lot as well. Still, I thought I’d be better off leaving my sensible sport utility vehicle parked away from all the testosterone. By the looks of the place, my car would get chlamydia if it got too close.
“I don’t really care, Gabby. This is important,” the self-important prick known as Quincy Harker said from my phone. I don’t like Harker. I don’t like the fact that he lied to me to get me to help him on our first case together (admittedly I mean more “not shoot him” than actually help). I don’t like the fact that he spends the majority of his time with Dracula, the monster my great-grandfather famously hunted and thought he killed. I don’t like that he seems to know a lot more about Grandpa Abe than I do, having actually met the old man when he was a little kid. And I really don’t like that he and his little merry band of assholes called The Shadow Council keep talking me into doing shit that goes directly against my best interests, like getting in the middle of a goddamned demon invasion in Georgia, of all godforsaken places.
Fuck Georgia. I’m a Midwest girl, through and through. I like St. Louis. I like Chicago. I even like Detroit, and nobody likes Detroit. So even six months later, I was still irritated at Harker for getting me wrapped up in some bullshit save the world scheme in Atlanta last year.
“So is me getting paid, Harker. Some of us have jobs, remember? We can’t all live off the riches our parasitic uncles have stashed all over the world.”
“You know there’s a stipend available for all Council members, right?”
I felt my eyes widen at his slightly distorted words. I took the phone off speaker and brought it to my ear. “No. That wasn’t part of the friggin’ welcome packet, you prick.” Did this asshole mean to tell me that I’d been living on ramen and shitty bail jumper gigs for almost two years since he fucked my deal with Homeland Security?
“Oh, sorry about that. Must have slipped my mind. We can have all your back pay deposited into your account this afternoon. Now can I tell you about Lucifer?”
“No,” I said. “We are not done with me bitching at you yet. You think you can just kill my contact at Homeland Security, get my monster-hunting contract with the government cancelled, and I’ll forgive you just because you wave a fistful of singles under my nose like I’m some dancer at your favorite topless bar?”
“One, I don’t go to strip clubs anymore. My fiancée doesn’t approve. Two, you didn’t even know Smith was your contact until he was dead and your contract got cancelled. And three, the stipend is a little more than a fistful of singles.” Harker named a figure, and I got quiet. That was a big fistful of money.
“Is that the two years I’m owed in back pay?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“No, Gabriella, that is your annual stipend. So you’re owed double that. Like I said, I’ll have Dennis deposit the money this afternoon. Now can I get you to focus on the important things, like saving the world?”
I put the phone back on speaker and set it in the cupholder. I leaned back, keeping an eye on the front door of the bar. My intel said that the skip was inside and unlikely to leave until daylight, so I wasn’t in much of a rush. “Got ahead, Harker. Spill it. What’s so damned important? I thought we were just hunting down your hottie angel’s wings.”
“Yeah, it got more complicated,” he said. “Lucifer is involved, and he’s taken Uriel, one of the other Archangels, to Hell. If he kills Uriel while they’re on a divine plane, he can take up Uriel’s mantle and become an Archangel again. Then Lucifer will be able to get back into Heaven at will. I’m guessing you can see how that ends poorly for most of the known universe.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. So are we off of Operation Wingy-Dingy now and back on the Save the World train?” I asked.
“Not yet. We need to figure out how to get to Hell—”
“I’ve told you to go to hell a lot. You should have listened.”
“Funny. Anyway, Luke and Dennis, along with Sealtiel, are trying to figure out how to get us across the planar divide without the requisite dying. Until they get that figured out, we’re still working on the idea that the more Archangels we have at our side when we storm the Gates of Hell, the better.”
“Makes sense. I’ll get right on finding Ragu as soon as I’m done here.”
“Raguel,” Harker corrected.
“Gesundheit.” I hung up the phone, laughing. It was petty, and I knew it, but he was just an infuriating son of a bitch. He had it all—looks, sexy British accent, and a girlfriend that I would just love to get alone for an hour or ten. I shoved the thoughts of Harker and his hottie aside and refocused on the target at hand.
I swiped and tapped at my phone for a couple seconds, and a picture appeared. James Monroe “Blackheart” Burris was a big guy, six-three according to his mug shot, with a dark ponytail showing a little gray and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Tattoos all over his arms and creeping up from under his shirt to peek out under the neck of his t-shirt. According to my surveillance, he favored black t-shirts, often with a Harley logo, jeans, engineer boots, a chain wallet, and a leather jacket with his Sons of Hell cut on the back of it.
You know, just the kind of guy you want to take home to mama. If mama was a psychopath. I swiped across the screen, and my motivation for this job popped up on the screen. Taneisha Cooper Burris, estranged wife of the asshole currently sitting in a biker bar with his hand on a twenty-year-old waitress’s ass while Taneisha sat home worrying about losing her condo if this dickhole failed to appear in court in three days. In Chicago. In Illinois, where Blackheart Burris was supposed to remain until such time as he faced trial for armed robbery according to the terms of his bail.
So while his wife worked two jobs to keep his four-year-old daughter clothed and fed, Blackheart yukked it up across state lines with some of his Sons of Hell buddies from another chapter. He’d been hanging around St. Louis for about a week before I caught wind of him, and I’d had eyes on the clubhouse for a couple days now. It was your typical biker bar—dingy, well-armed, shitload of David Allen Coe on the jukebox, and next to no police presence in the surrounding blocks.
I got out of the Toaster and walked around to the back doors. Pulling them open, I flipped the back seats down, yanked the headrests off, and lifted the inside edge of each seat, then hooked it to the wall. That turned the back of the Element into essentially a small panel van. I opened the tool box I had bolted to the floor and took out my Sig Sauer P320. I clipped the holster to the inside of my jeans and slipped the pistol home in the front of my jeans. I pulled on a loose black hoodie, dropped the front of the sweatshirt down over the butt of the gun, and grabbed two pair of zip cuffs out of the box. Not for the first time, I wondered how badly my little toy box would be received in a traffic stop and vowed to obey more speed limits and road signs in the future.
I closed the doors of the Toaster, took my hair down out of the ponytail I usually wore, and used my reflection in the rear windows of the car to slut up my lipstick and poof my hair a little. I thanked Eema for the thick black hair her Romany heritage blessed me with and put a lot more strut into my walk than normal, then headed toward the front door of the club.
I was halfway there when I realized I’d left my phone sitting in the cupholder. Oh well, it’s not like there was anybody I could call to bail my ass out if I got in over my head anyway. Just another day in the glamorous life of Gabriella Van Helsing, great-granddaughter of the most famous vampire hunter in history, now reduced to chasing down bail jumpers in shitty bars in Missouri. But hey, on my off days, I got to save the world with a bunch of weirdos and monsters. Yay.
The no-neck imbecile at the door didn’t even pat me down, just looked down my hoodie at the cleavage on display and waved me in. It’s not even like I was wearing anything sexy, just a scoop-neck t-shirt. But men are stupid. I might as well use that stupid to my advantage.
Aforementioned stupid was on display at its finest in the bar, which boasted not only dim lights, thick smoke, and loud music, but also a pair of behemoths arm-wrestling, two stick-thin girls weaving between pinching fingers to deliver drinks, and a giant bald guy behind the bar glaring at everyone and everything. Why is the guy behind the bar always pissed off? It’s not like he gets hit in the inevitable fights, he’s got bar to hide behind. I sauntered over to the bar, making sure to get my hips rocking from side to side as I strutted across the sticky floor, and I leaned my hoodie-clad elbows on the damp wood.
“How about a shot?” I asked, giving him my best “come hither” look.
He responded with a scowl. “What you want?”
“Let’s try something fun. How about a red-headed slut?” I gave him a smile usually guaranteed to get me at least a couple of phone numbers, if not a free drink or three.
He didn’t return the smile. If anything, his scowl deepened. “All our sluts are brunettes. You want Jack or Jim?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the limited booze selection.
“How about Wild Turkey? I’m feeling like bourbon. Wanna feel?”
Still nothing. Not even a crack of a smile. Damn, that one even gets me a laugh at gay bars where all the boys are prettier than me, but this guy was not interested. He poured me a shot of bourbon, and I knocked it back, feeling the brown liquor burn all the way down. I turned the glass upside down on the bar and looked at CueBall. “Another. This one on the rocks.”
Then I turned around and looked around the rest of the bar, trying to zero in on my quarry. I found him easy enough, sitting at a table with his back to a wall and a blond piece of jailbait on his lap. The remains of most of a case of beer littered the floor around his table, and he and a pair of other goons passed a joint around the table right under a No Smoking sign. Everything pointed to a pretty rocking poker game in progress, and every time Burris dragged a pile of chips back to his side of the table, he slipped one into the brassiere of the girl on this lap. After a run of particularly good hands, the married bail jumper whose wife was about to lose her house because of his unauthorized travel plans spun the girl on his lap around and spent a good minute and a half using his tongue to check the health of her tonsils.
Yeah, this guy was going to get an ass-kicking. I sipped my bourbon and watched my quarry until I was down to ice cubes, then I reached behind me to set my glass down and go get my jumper. That’s when the bartender grabbed my wrist and leaned over. “You’re about to make a big mistake, little girl.”
I really hate being called “girl.” Shit was about to get real.
Did you dig it? Do you want more? Buy it here! Hell, you can even read the whole thing for free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited! Want to read this and everything else I release early? Or on a non-kindle ebook platform? Join my Patreon and get pre-release copies in whatever format you like!
by john | Apr 12, 2018 | Harker
[ppp_patron_only][/ppp_patron_only]
This is the cover for the newest book in the HarkerVerse – She Talks to Angels, releasing on 4/19! This post is locked to Patreon patrons for three days, then it will be visible to the world free and clear!
by john | Mar 20, 2018 | Writing
My new high fantasy novel, Queen of Kats, released today. This is the complete saga that I began as a serial a couple of years ago and let fall by the wayside, but now it’s complete, and available in print and digital formats on Amazon and wherever print books are sold. Here’s the first chapter, so you can see what you’re getting into…
Chapter 1
Remarin’s feet slid on the slick cobblestones as he rounded the corner, threatening to send him sprawling into the street and under the wheels of a cartload of whiskey barrels. Scrambling madly and bowling over a rotund matron loaded down with laundry, the slight thief regained his footing and dashed off down an unlit alley. He ducked into a darkened doorway as four mailed, spear-toting guards barreled down the street. Remarin sagged with relief but kept to the shadows as he crept slowly to the mouth of the alley.
Remarin peered back the way he’d run, ducking back into the shadows as two more heavyset guards came into view at more a trot than a sprint. They clattered past, chainmail and breastplates shattering the stillness of the night with their cacophonous rattle. Remarin stayed frozen until they were long past, then exited the alley and walked back the way he’d come, affecting a casual swagger to hide the adrenaline-fueled trembling in his legs.
That was close, Remoron. The voice in his head was dry as burnt toast, and Remarin glanced down at his belt. The black hilt of a dagger hung there, a ruby set into the pommel. In the heart of the ruby, a small light flickered as if there were a flame dancing within the gem.
“Trand, you’re back. I thought I left you in the belly of the first guard,” Remarin whispered, long practice allowing him to converse with the dagger with the barest hint of lips moving.
I’m not that easy to get rid of. We’re stuck with each other until you’re dead or I’m released from this stupid curse.
“Or I smelt you down into earrings for that good-looking tavern wench I met last week. What was her name again?” The dagger didn’t answer. Grateful for the rare silence, Remarin turned a corner off the main merchant’s thoroughfare and headed toward the poorer section of Bravis, capital city and principal port of the kingdom of Veosia.
Here on the cheap streets one could find a pub with a room to let, a man in an alley with goods of undisclosed provenance, or a good street brawl if that’s what one was looking for. Tonight Remarin was in search of none of that. He found what he was looking for just a few short blocks from the merchant’s district in a nondescript building nestled between a bustling pub and a shuttered laundry. He knocked twice on the door, waited for three breaths, then knocked twice more.
The door opened and a wizened man of maybe five feet in height stepped back to allow the thief entrance. “Welcome back, Remarin. I trust you have my goods?”
“I have the jewel, Salvar. I assume you have my money?”
“I have everything you’re entitled to, thief. Hand over my gem, and I’ll fetch your payment.” Something in the little man’s tone rung false with Remarin and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the gem flash brighter than normal in the dagger’s hilt.
“Not to be suspicious, Salvar, but let’s see the payment first.” Remarin stepped slowly back until he could feel the door against his back heel. He couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, and that alarmed him even further. At this time of night, the tavern next door should be raucous, full of the sounds of drunken fighting and off-key warbling from the horrible bard they kept chained up by the fireplace. But tonight, nothing. Not a scrape of a chair, not a single slurred bellow for more ale, not even the twang of an out of tune lute.
Something’s amiss here. The voice in his head now sounded worried, as though the dagger actually cared what happened to Remarin.
“Really? And here I thought the tingling along my spine just a draft,” Remarin whispered.
Salvar, for his part, was playing the role of affronted partner to the hilt. “Why, Remarin, I’m amazed at your lack of trust! How many times have we done business? How many times have I moved merchandise of questionable ownership for you? And how many times have I given you fair market value for goods that I couldn’t move for weeks, even months? And now you choose to mistrust me? I may as well turn my back on you so you can pull the dagger out and stab me through the heart again!”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Salvar. It’s that I don’t trust anyone. A trusting thief very quickly ends up as a dead thief, and I have no interest in becoming a dead thief. Now where’s the money?”
The corrupt little pawnbroker fidgeted for a long moment before reaching behind the counter. His hand came up with a dagger and Salvar let out a yell. “Help!”
Remarin whirled around and shot the bolt on the door. He grabbed the heavy wooden plank that leaned against it and set it into the two iron holders, securing the front entrance for a few moments at least. He turned back to Salvar and drew his own dagger. “You know you can’t best me in a knife fight, Salvar. Why even try?”
“Because I’m being paid very handsomely to deliver your dead body, and if I don’t kill you, I don’t get paid,” Salvar said, waving his dagger around in an almost-convincing display of knife work.
“I admire a man who sticks to his principles, Salvar. Even if those principles are killing me. For that, I’ll let you die quickly.” Remarin changed his grip and flicked the dagger across the room. The ruby-hilted blade tumbled end over end to bury itself in the hollow of Salvar’s throat. “Sometimes it’s very useful having an enchanted weapon around.”
Are you claiming that there are times that it is not useful to have me around? Trand’s voice echoed in Remarin’s mind as he crossed the room to pull the dagger out of Salvar and wipe it on the dying man’s tunic.
“Yeah, Trand. Like when you’re talking. I could definitely live without talking to my weapons.”
You’re just mad that I’ve got a bigger vocabulary than you do. And there are two of them behind the door.
“I knew that,” Remarin grumbled, pulling open the door that led to Salvar’s storeroom. A pair of surprised mercenaries stood there, hands on sword hilts and shields at their sides. Remarin drew his rapier and ran the first one through the throat in one fluid motion. The second charged the slight thief, knocking him over and adding to his growing collection of bruises. Remarin grabbed the man’s ankle and dragged him to the floor before he could reach the front door and open it for his reinforcements, then clambered up the man’s back and slit his throat with a spare dagger he drew from his boot.
“Is that all of them?” Remarin gasped. Trand remained silent. “Trand, are there any more of them?” Nothing. Remarin sighed. “Fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t know there were two of them in the storeroom; I could only hear one. You saved my ass. Again. Are you happy now?”
No, but if you let me stab something else, I might be able to recover from your appalling lack of faith in me. There are four outside but no more in the building.
“Then I’ve got enough time to loot the place and sneak out the back way,” Remarin replied. He wiped his dagger down, slid it home in his boot, sheathed his rapier, and commenced to pilfering any valuables the mercenaries might have had on their persons. He gathered up a couple of necklaces, three good rings, and one jeweled earring, understanding that most mercenaries kept their savings in jewelry since it was easily portable.
Salvar’s body proved as worthless as the man’s loyalty, yielding nothing worth stealing, but Remarin knew where the pawnbroker stored his gems and gold. The thief moved soundlessly up the stairs to Salvar’s bedroom and flung open the door. He stepped quickly to the center of the room, flipped back the corner of the rug, and pried up the false floor at the edge of the bed. He’d cased Salvar’s home and shop many years ago when they first began to do business, just in case something like this ever happened. “Better safe than sorry, I always say.”
No, you don’t. You always say something remarkably stupid like, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Well, you could end up dead or trapped inside a magical dagger for a thousand years, that’s what could happen!
“Shut up, Trand,” Remarin said, filling his purse with jewels and what coins he had room for. He barely felt the air shift above him but dove for the floor in time to avoid the brass candlestick swinging at his head. The startled burglar flipped onto his back and got his arms up in time to block the return strike before his brains got smeared all over the floor. The blow had little force behind it, and Remarin easily disarmed his attacker and sprang to his feet. He drew back a fist to continue the fight but froze when he saw the dirty face of a young boy staring up at him.
If you’d like to read more, you can get the ebook on Amazon, or order a print copy from your local independent bookstore, like Park Road Books, right here in Charlotte.
