I've been putting off the revisions long enough. It's time to delve into my least favorite part of writing - taking apart my baby and putting it back together stronger, faster, better.
But while I'm working through that fraught task, I wanted to share the cover for Possum Creek Massacre with you all, so you have an idea of what's coming soon.
You might note the very spiffy cover quote from the magnanimous DJ Butler. He's a great author, and I'm hoping you all are familiar with his stuff. If you aren't, you should check it out on Amazon. I ran into him at LTUE, joked about a quote and to my surprise, he asked me to send the book and blurb to him, then sent me this in return. A gentleman and a scholar, the pirate hat is just disguise. "Dastardly murder and dark magic in Appalachia. POSSUM CREEK MASSACRE will draw you and hold you!" -- D.J. Butler, author of WITCHY EYE"
Some of my readers may recall that I shared the chapter headings, which were largely derived from Bible verses and hymn lyrics, in another post. And if you have not read Book 1, Snow in Her Eyes, you can do so on Amazon, but it's not entirely necessary, as the books are independent of one another except for the main character, Amaya.
So what is Possum Creek Massacre all about?
Summoned to the back woods of Appalachia to use her magic hunting skills, Amaya Lombard faces perhaps the most challenging case of her career. The roots of evil plunge deeply into the past, and the blood soaked history of Kentucky's witch warded houses and barns may hold the key to keeping her alive in the present. Someone has learned that killing for magic yields great power, and Amaya is powerless to use anything but her senses to keep them from killing again. She's gotten lucky, she walked into a murder scene and gained unlikely allies. Perhaps that will be enough to keep her from joining the dead.
And if that's not enough to whet your appetite, here's a snippet of the beginning of the book, in all it's unedited glory (manuscript is subject to change, etcetera...)
Benediction
Someone had told her that cloth worked to add insulation, so the small room was lined with clothing stapled, nailed, and pinned to all the walls and ceilings. Shirts, pants, even a baby’s christening gown, yellow with age. Layers, and layers upon layers, every bit she could find from the attics and in the free store. A colorful quilt, faded with age and tattered with the wind, hung in front of the open window, rippling slightly. The idea had been to keep warm in the winter and cooler in the summer, but it didn’t work so well in the summer. It was cooler to sleep on the porch, even if the mosquitoes were a torment. She’d been sleeping there since May, and had planned to continue until September, but she didn’t have that long.
Instead, it all came to an end in that last room. The big farmhouse had been a home, once, maybe a generation ago. But then the big combine farms had come in and bought up all the level land. Families were banished to work in the factories. Stone barns she’d remembered from her girlhood, standing since before her great-grandaddy’s time, had been ruthlessly leveled to the ground, but some of the houses had been left standing. Most were gone, slowly falling to rack and ruin, but some had been kept up on the outside simply to discourage tramps. People like her. People who didn’t have a place of their own. People who were odd.
She’d retreated slowly, lapped by humanity and trapped like a bird in the kitchen. She’d remembered that bird, in the last moments of her life, how it had beaten itself to death trying to get through the glass to the freedom it could see just outside. She’d hung quilts over all the windows, or whatever she could find, so she couldn’t see the outside. It wasn’t so hard when she couldn’t see out.
The end had been a surprise, and an unpleasant one. She’d expected to go old and worn and beaten down. She hadn’t expected that someone who knew what she was would find her, and want her. No one had ever wanted her. Now that someone did, it terrified her, and she fled to the last refuge, the room layered in clothes like tapestries of life pinned up all around to keep the cold at bay. She had fallen there, and might have lain there until this house, too, was taken by the trees and the honeysuckle and the kudzu.
She might have vanished entirely, her death a last benediction to an unpleasant life, if it hadn’t been for a kid and a dog.
Cleaving the Sky
The heat and humidity wrapped around me like a blanket when I stepped off the airplane and walked across the tarmac toward the Cincinnati Airport Terminal. I was used to humidity - anyone who has lived most of their life on the Oregon coast knows what ‘wet’ feels like. The heat, on the other hand, had me wishing I could pant like a dog. Walking back into the terminal was only a temporary relief as I had to walk right back out on the other side. I didn’t even need to wait for a bag, they’d told me to come quickly and it would only take a day or two. I’d put what I needed in a daypack and gotten on the plane in Medford, which was closer than driving to Portland, and now I was here in Kentucky and wishing I wasn’t.
The thing was, there weren’t a lot of people like me. And there were even fewer who were willing to work in the sight of the law. Near as I could tell, I was the only one of my kind who was a full-fledged detective. Which meant that sometimes my captain, who was otherwise a nice guy and a good boss, loaned me out. I walked through the invisible security line that fooled no-one, and looked around the lobby area for my ride. I spotted him talking to the security officer near the information desk, and headed in their direction.
He caught me out of the corner of his eye, and turned. Something I knew about cops, good cops, is that even with their peripheral vision, they could see the oddity in the crowd, the one who stuck out. I was walking toward him, and I didn’t look like the others around me. So he looked.
I put out my hand, and he shook. “Detective Lombard, I presume.” His voice had a hint of a drawl, and he was smiling just a little.
“I am. And you are?” The security guard had faded away when the deputy turned to greet me, and we were alone in the crowd.
“Deputy Mark White. Call me Mark. Connie sent me, and said to tell you sorry, but he had to go on a call.” He glanced toward the baggage claim when he came to the end of his sentence, and I picked up on it and shook my head.
“I just have the pack. I appreciate the ride, Mark. Since we’re doing first names, I’m Amaya.”
His eyebrows went up just a little. It wasn’t a common name, and I refused to shorten it to Amy. “Well, then, shall we?” He gestured to the doors.
I followed him out to the cruiser he’d parked in the bus zone, and climbed carefully into the passenger side. With the technology built into the dash, it wasn’t really meant for two people, but at least the laptop stand had been put away so I didn’t have to ride in the back. He pulled away from the curb and cranked the AC up on high.
“Hotter than usual this summer.” He chuckled. “But then, I think we say that every summer. Have you been to the state of Kentucky before?”
“I have not had the pleasure.” I told him, looking out the window. Like most airports, it was surrounded by a small industrial park, but that gave way to cornfields and then the interstate lined with trees and fields flying by. I found it rather flat after the Cascades, but bright and sunshiny, which was a bit of a treat.
“Meth capital of the world.” He sounded gloomy, and looked it. He’d not put on the sunglasses he had hooked over the upper edge of his body armor, just above his breastbone. I wasn’t wearing any. I didn’t own any. It wasn’t that I didn’t need it, not like that. I could be killed by a bullet. Besides, traveling in it would just be ugly.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” I prompted.
He looked away from the road at me, quickly, before returning his attention to the traffic. “No, ma’am.”
He wasn’t going to be drawn into a conversation about it, either. I settled back and contemplated the scenery. It was pretty built up, here. He took us off one interstate, and onto another multi-lane highway. I didn’t worry too much about directions, I wasn’t going to be driving around here. We had another hour and a half to to go, if my googling had been accurate. I’d debated over whether to fly into Knoxville, or Cincinnati, and maybe it had been the wrong choice. But there wasn’t an airport near where I was going. There wasn’t much of anything near the little county sheriff's office that had asked for help. I wondered if we’d go to their offices first, or the scene.
I had very little to go on. It always drove me crazy, the enigmatic response most cops had to magical incidents. They didn’t know what to do with it, it wasn’t normal and sane, so they retreated to saying as little as possible. Less to come back and bite them on the ass later, if they didn’t talk about it, or write it down, or, I thought uncharitably, even thought much about it. I wondered if the deputy knew more than I did.
“Were you on the scene?” I asked.
He stared out the windshield, focusing on traffic, but I could see his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. “Not until... later.” He answered reluctantly. I could see that he really didn’t want to talk about it, but I needed to know more than I needed to make him happy and comfortable.
“I have very little intelligence on this scene,” I told him, hoping that I could get him to understand that just like him, I wanted to know more. Wanted to know what I was walking into. None of us like walking into a scene blind. “What were your impressions?”
“Um.” He didn’t look at me, but I could see his brow wrinkle a little in thought. “Well, at first we all just thought it was a dead vagrant. I wasn’t on the first call, and, well, it’s not unheard of here.”
“In my part of the country, either,” I offered him an olive branch. He sounded ashamed, like he figured I thought he was a hick from Buglick and dumber than doughnuts. “Weather’s mild, the folks who don’t have any roots drift in. Then they die from disease and what-not.”
“Yeah.” He flicked a glance at me. “So you get that it wasn’t high-priority.”
“Right.” I settled back. He was ready to talk now.
“We have any number of abandoned houses. Plenty of reasons, from the bad economy to the big farms pushing out the small ones. Mostly the economy. Anyway, we try to keep an eye on them. Some are in really shitty shape, and anyone squatting is risking life and limb. Some of them,” he shrugged. “Well, this is the meth capital.”
“That’s what got attention?” I prompted.
“Well, sort of. There’s a kid that knows this house. He walks his dog by it. Not on a leash; most folks around here don’t feel they need them. Anyways, dog goes nuts and charges into the house; the backdoor was hanging off its hinges.”
“Ah.” That told me that someone had wanted in the house and didn’t care about others knowing it later. If they’d intended to come back, they could have gotten in another way.
“So the kid chases the dog, and finds it trying to get through a bedroom door, pulls it away, and has the presence of mind to realize that was blood coming out from under it. That, and he said there were a lot of flies.”
“Country kids.” I smiled at the thought. The kid had probably freaked out, but at least he’d known what he was looking at.
“Ayup,” he grinned. “So his uncle is my boss...”
“Small towns are good that way.” I watched as he took the exit off the interstate and onto a road that wound between emerald pastures and black fences. Those were different. I wondered if they painted the wood with creosote. Or maybe they preferred the dark to the light white picket fence of the television dream of an alternate world.
“First deputy on the scene vomited.” He spoke again when we were away from the interstate. “I’ve seen the photos, not sure I wouldn’t have. We don’t see a lot of death out here, and not much violent death, but we’re not green as grass.” His lips were compressed, thin, when he stopped talking.
“Wouldn’t assume that at all,” I told him. “I have, ah, special talents. Not smarts. Just something different.”