Sunday Snippet
It's been a bit quiet over here for a while, so I thought I'd post a Sunday Snippet.
ETA:Well, the original Sunday Snippet is no more, as I've taken it down to play with it :-) Thanks for reading, and I hope you all enjoyed!
But rather than leave you with nothing, here's an extract from The Cold Kiss of Death, book 2 in my Spellcrackers.com series.
Enjoy!
My ‘date’ was hot; nothing to do with Finn, my boss, but entirely thanks to the gas-fired heaters in the underground tunnel. The air they blasted out was enough to raise the temperature to a level that only a fire-dragon would appreciate. But I could cope with the heat; it was the ghost part of the job that had sweat slicking down my spine.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose as another ghost shuffled into view, his bloated, blackened feet scuffing along the dirt floor, sending little puffs of dust into the still air. A deep cut marred his left cheek; the bone it revealed was white and glistening. His eyes stared blankly out of sunken sockets and the end of his nose was eaten away by a huge black sore.
He headed straight towards us and I counted the seconds down - three, two, one - then winced, half in sympathy, half in teeth-gritted anxiety, as he hit the wall of the protective circle in which Finn and I sat. The ghost’s lipless mouth flattened against the magic while his skeletal hands scrabbled for purchase not more than four feet in front of me.
I suppressed a shudder, shifting nervously in my deckchair as he slid his way round the circle until he was back on route and shambling off on his way. Sighing with relief, I touched my laptop keypad and entered the time against the ghost’s name - Scarface - on the spreadsheet, then duplicated the info on my pad, just in case. The laptop might have an extra-strength Buffer spell in the crystal stuck to its case, but I wasn’t taking any chances. All it needed was a stray bit of magic and I’d end up with one cracked crystal, one dead hard drive and an irretrievable ghost survey.
I tapped my pencil on my pad and wondered for about the hundredth time what I’d done to deserve a night sitting under London Bridge counting ghosts, especially after my frustrating run-in with Cosette. And not just any ghosts, but the ghosts of fourteenth-century plague victims. My phobia’s bad enough when the dead look relatively normal, without adding in all the stomach-roiling stuff. Not to mention we were camped out deep in the bridge’s foundations in the area known as the tombs - right on top of the plague victims’ burial pits.
Could my night get any worse?
‘That’s the fifth time he’s done that,’ I said, drawing a little Edvard Munch face, mouth wide open in a scream. ‘I was sort of hoping he’d catch on that there was something in his way by now.’
***
Extract taken from start of chapter 2 - chapter 1 can be read here
ETA:Well, the original Sunday Snippet is no more, as I've taken it down to play with it :-) Thanks for reading, and I hope you all enjoyed!
But rather than leave you with nothing, here's an extract from The Cold Kiss of Death, book 2 in my Spellcrackers.com series.
Enjoy!
My ‘date’ was hot; nothing to do with Finn, my boss, but entirely thanks to the gas-fired heaters in the underground tunnel. The air they blasted out was enough to raise the temperature to a level that only a fire-dragon would appreciate. But I could cope with the heat; it was the ghost part of the job that had sweat slicking down my spine.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose as another ghost shuffled into view, his bloated, blackened feet scuffing along the dirt floor, sending little puffs of dust into the still air. A deep cut marred his left cheek; the bone it revealed was white and glistening. His eyes stared blankly out of sunken sockets and the end of his nose was eaten away by a huge black sore.
He headed straight towards us and I counted the seconds down - three, two, one - then winced, half in sympathy, half in teeth-gritted anxiety, as he hit the wall of the protective circle in which Finn and I sat. The ghost’s lipless mouth flattened against the magic while his skeletal hands scrabbled for purchase not more than four feet in front of me.
I suppressed a shudder, shifting nervously in my deckchair as he slid his way round the circle until he was back on route and shambling off on his way. Sighing with relief, I touched my laptop keypad and entered the time against the ghost’s name - Scarface - on the spreadsheet, then duplicated the info on my pad, just in case. The laptop might have an extra-strength Buffer spell in the crystal stuck to its case, but I wasn’t taking any chances. All it needed was a stray bit of magic and I’d end up with one cracked crystal, one dead hard drive and an irretrievable ghost survey.
I tapped my pencil on my pad and wondered for about the hundredth time what I’d done to deserve a night sitting under London Bridge counting ghosts, especially after my frustrating run-in with Cosette. And not just any ghosts, but the ghosts of fourteenth-century plague victims. My phobia’s bad enough when the dead look relatively normal, without adding in all the stomach-roiling stuff. Not to mention we were camped out deep in the bridge’s foundations in the area known as the tombs - right on top of the plague victims’ burial pits.
Could my night get any worse?
‘That’s the fifth time he’s done that,’ I said, drawing a little Edvard Munch face, mouth wide open in a scream. ‘I was sort of hoping he’d catch on that there was something in his way by now.’
***
Extract taken from start of chapter 2 - chapter 1 can be read here