The Midnight Lullaby – Chapter One Excerpt

Everybody has secrets…

For years, Benedict Lyon has been living a lie. Not even his family knows the truth he’s been keeping from the world. Only Emmeline knows his secret—and she’s dead.

…some are darker than others…

When the matriarch of the Lyon family passes away, Benedict is summoned home for the funeral. Emmeline urges Benedict not to go, certain that if he returns to that house, neither one of them will escape.

…but are they worth dying for?

Their presence in the family home causes the spirit of Gloria Lyon to become restless, and as the remaining members of the Lyon family attempt to put their mother to rest, long buried secrets, some deadlier than others, are unearthed. Who will survive…

The Midnight Lullaby

Coming soon! Pre-order on amazon!

Chapter One Excerpt

Benedict was eight years old, sitting on a stiff chair in the dark hallway of a house he didn’t know. He clamped his hands around the edges of his seat, trying to press his bones so tight that they wouldn’t shake. His head whipped from side to side, unblinking as he searched for shapes.

“Tell me where it is!” Gloria’s voice boomed from the room down the hall. Benedict winced, squinting to see through the doorway and into the wild flicker of candlelight.

The witch screamed, writhing on the floor at Gloria’s feet. She chanted between her howls, head thumping back against the floor and narrow chest pushing high. Even from this distance, and even with her screeches in the air, he heard her bones cracking.

“Give me the book!” Gloria roared.

Wind rushed through the house, knocking the pictures from the walls. Windows cracked in their frames. Doors opened and closed with furious bangs upstairs.

“Can you see them?” Elysium whispered.

Benedict gulped ragged breaths, fear marching a parade through his chest with the big drums in his ears. “No.”

His brother sighed, the teen crouching in front of Benedict. “Benny, there.” He pointed down the hall, toward the open doorway and their mother’s booming voice demanding to know where the spirit-wielder hid her book of secrets. “There. You see that one? He’s big. You have to see him.”

Benedict cried but didn’t blink at the tears, staring down the hall through a liquid haze. He saw the doorway and the lights inside and his mother’s shadow cast across the twisting woman on the floor. “There’s no one in the hall,” he confessed.

The floorboards squeaked; he saw them straining and heard the heavy footfalls coming toward them, but he didn’t see the ghost.

“What’s happening?” Benedict begged, small voice almost lost under the raging of the house. He jumped at a scratching sound, claws on hardwood, and a sickly meowing.

“The witch is calling the spirits she’s trapped here,” his brother explained.

“Will they hurt Mother?” Benedict asked, still staring down the hallway. The heavy steps getting closer.

“Do you see him yet?” Elysium asked rather than answering, head whipping back and forth, watching something in the empty hall and studying his baby brother.

Benedict wrinkled his nose, trying not to cry.

The floorboards creaked closer and closer, his little heart fluttering wildly in his chest.

“Benny, you see him, right?” Elysium shouted over the groaning walls and wailing woman—over the scratching and the creaking and that awful meowing. “Benny—”

Benedict screamed when something pulled Elysium away from him and dragged his older brother down the hall, tossing him into a dark parlor with a heavy thud.

Benedict jumped down from his chair and ran after him, tears spilling over his lashes. He didn’t see whatever they saw, but he knew it was real. He looked around at the empty chairs and couches, his hands balled into fists against his sides. “Elysium?” he whispered.

A thump on the wall drew his gaze up, eyes straining and vision blurring at the edges.

His brother was there, pinned against the wall by an unseen force and held so high up that the top of his head almost brushed the ceiling. Elysium rasped in ragged breaths, heels kicking against the wall.

Benedict backed up, unable to look away until he bumped into a closet door. The scratching grew louder, the yowling from inside desperate. He twisted around and stared at the doorknob.

He knew he shouldn’t open it, but a whisper told him he had to. Something was inside…  something that needed out.

The boy reached up and used both hands to turn the knob. The door opened with a pop, and he shuffled back from it. For one blessed moment, the scratching stopped, the meowing went silent, and then the mangy monsters poured out. Cats, twisted and thin, half-decayed but still moving. Their claws scratched against the floor, never retracting into their paws, some with no meat to call a paw anymore. One looked up at Benedict, an empty socket and the glint of bone flashing at him. It meowed, and he could see the vocal cords rattling in its neck where the fur and flesh were missing.

He screamed, but the house only grew louder, trying to smother him.

And then he was off his feet.

For a second, he choked on his sounds, terrified that the ghost had snatched him up like it had Elysium, and then he inhaled and knew exactly whose arms he was in. His brother held him against his shoulder and ran from the room, kicking the door shut behind them. He didn’t stop, running straight down the corridor and toward the sound of their mother’s voice. Benedict buried his face in that shoulder, rubbing his tears out in the fabric of his shirt and hoping even now that Mother wouldn’t notice how he had cried.

Elysium put him down on his feet in a corner of the room, kneeling in front of him and pulling a piece of white chalk from his vest pocket. Benedict, drowning in his own fear, couldn’t stop gasping for air. Elysium drew a half-circle on the wood floor from wall to wall, closing Benedict into the corner, and then started sketching runes over the edges of the circle. “Don’t move,” he yelled over the storm of spirits.

Benedict bit his lip to keep from whining, looking past Elysium at the woman writhing in the middle of the room. She clawed score marks into the floorboards like the cats had, her orange hair long and knotted around her face and shoulders. Her boots thudded and kicked, but she couldn’t get away, pinned there on the ground by Gloria Lyon’s will. His mother stood over her, her dark hair braided over one shoulder and her sharp, black suit making her look like a shadow come to life. “Relent the book. Release the spirits. And I will spare you,” Gloria shouted, unmoved by all the shows of power the other woman had displayed—by all the fury of her creations in this house.

The woman on the floor screamed, and Benedict could hear windows breaking.

Elysium cupped the sides of his face in his hands, making Benedict look at him rather than them. “Okay, Benny. You know how this works.”

Benedict swallowed hard, trying again not to cry. He nodded once, and Elysium flashed him a smile.

Benedict closed his eyes.

The battle of wills continued to rage on, screams and thuds rampant in the house, but he didn’t open his eyes to see. He pressed the heels of his palms into his ears when the screaming grew to be too much, shaking his head when he heard Elysium cry out in pain and gasping for air when those horrible yowls grew closer and closer.

But he didn’t open his eyes. Not until the house had finally gone quiet hours later. Not until his mother picked him up from the corner and carried him out of the house. She put him in the back seat of the car, and he waited. When she came back, Elysium was with her, one arm broken and folded to his chest and the other carrying a worn, leather-bound notebook.

Benedict blinked out the window. The sun peeked over the houses down the hillside in bright wisps of pink and orange. When the house they had come from went up in flames, it wasn’t wisps of orange like the ones in the sky. There were no shades of pink. Just violent, furious heat.

Gloria had not spared the woman inside—not even when she gave up her book and released the spirits she had bound to her home.

Even Benedict, at eight years old, had known she wouldn’t show mercy. It wasn’t her way.

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Infernal Excerpt

An excerpt from Infernal, a horror novel about an adventurous group trying to escape a dangerous island.

She stood on that ledge and put the mouthpiece of her oxygen tank between her lips. She watched the opening at the top of her cage while Felix watched the shark. She held her camera close to her belly with both hands.

“Go,” he said, and she jumped.

The world went quiet. Not silent, but quiet. She sank down into the bottom of her cage and stayed there, turning on her camera and testing out the settings on the great open sea around her. When a shadow cut over her, she twisted up to film George from beneath as he circled the boat again. She stood, getting her bearings, and pushed the camera and her arms out the viewing hole to film the shark as he moved deeper, leaving the hunk of fish for a moment to circle her instead.

The cage shuddered, bobbed, and then started to move. Either Felix or Poppy were turning the crank to move her out from the boat. The chains rattled, making strange sounds in the water, the surface rippling around the top four edges. George seemed more interested when she moved, coming in closer, baring teeth for the camera and nudging the cage.

He swam between her and the boat and in the background of the shot she saw Felix drop down into the second cage. George whipped around to investigate and she filmed the massive fish closing in on Felix’s cage to take a closer look. The body of the shark blocked her view of the other cage completely and then, seemingly out of nowhere, a second shark burst up from the deep. Val knocked her shoulder against the bars but held fast to her camera. The second, larger shark shot straight up under George, caught his belly in her jaws and continued to thrust upward.

They breeched the surface together but with their combined weight, the flight was short-lived. They crashed back down and onto Felix’s cage. The whole back of the ship dipped down, pulled violently until either the cables or the rigging snapped. The sharks thrashed, stirring air into the water turned red with blood.

Val continued to hold the camera on reflex but stopped thinking about the shot. She stared over it in disbelief at the scene. The new shark, even larger than George, thrashed against the back of the boat atop the shark cage. She couldn’t see Felix through the writhing bodies of beasts and churning waters. Her heart sank low in her stomach when Felix’s cage dropped out from behind the fighting giants. She leaned hard into the front of her cage to see him slipping down into the dark, but the cage was empty. A sliver of relief washed over her, her body leaning forward into the bars and exhaling a gust of bubbles. Her gaze tore up to the fight again, suddenly horrified that he might be in those waters with the monster sharks.

Before she could worry about whether or not he had gotten out of the sea and into the boat, her own cage bobbed. Had the rigging really given way? Was her cage cut loose? It bobbed again, sinking lower, more than a meter from the surface now. Biting at her breather, she let go of the camera with one hand and pushed herself upward. Grabbing onto one edge of her cage and pulling, Val launched herself high enough to have her head break the surface. Water clung to her goggles and daylight gleamed, making her squint.

Felix stood on deck and even from this distance she could tell he was shouting, arms pulling with all his weight to try to turn the crank and drag her cage back in. It must have been stuck. They couldn’t reel her back to the boat. Lochner had left the wheelhouse, shouting something back to Felix and then pointing up at the rigging. Val looked up, squinting against the sun. The rigging had bent, half attached now where bolts ripped out and only struggling cables kept it together. Those cables were the ones still attached to her cage—dragging her in closer to the ship and closer to the sharks thrashing about the waters between.

Felix twisted to the side to look back at her. She was going to collide with the great whites. There was a chance she could survive just bunkered down in her vessel. There was a chance they would stop any second now and vanish into the deep. The water churned red, spraying into the air when a tail cut across the surface. There was also a chance they would push her cage down enough to snap those cables, or whatever fastened them to the ship, and she would have no choice but to swim up through that bloody water or sink to the bottom and eventually drown.

It seemed that the very moment she made her choice to abandon the cage, Felix climbed over the railing along the side of the ship and dove into the waters off the port. She pulled her legs up out of the cage and pushed off the metal railing. It was hard to swim away from the boat, away from safety rather than toward it, but she had to get distance from the struggle in the water. She sank down just enough to escape the splashing on the surface, breather exhaling bubbles and fins propelling her forward. She cut an arch in the blue, inelegant in the company of creatures made to swim.

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Writing The Wicker Witch

I have a couple projects in the works this year and among them are a few horror novellas/novels I’m writing and editing. I usually set aside a few weeks to write my first drafts. They’re sloppy but I get them done and then work on edits later on.

Last month I wrote my first draft of a work I’m currently calling The Wicker Witch. The first week went super smooth, the second got a little bumpy.

I dedicated a couple weeks to it and wrote five thousand words a day. My goal for the project was 50k but that was really just a guess. I wasn’t sure if it would come out longer or shorter.

I swear, I sent my dad a text first. He replied and that led to me calling him up at his 1:15am to talk about bridges for my book.

So the second week didn’t go quite as smooth as the first but I managed to stay on target for my word count. It went over the estimated 50k and into a third week. But it’s done!

And this is pretty much what it looks like! I write all my first drafts on Scrivener because you can have the outline in the same screen as well as a sidebar with character cards and this pretty little project target thingy!

Now, I should be on to editing this or one of the other finished first drafts on my desk BUT I jumped on another novella outline I had ready while I was still on a writing kick.

So, wish me luck! Because now I’m writing a novella about a demon and a mobster on a joyride!

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Burn Out

Burn out is something I’ve heard many artists and creators talk about and thought, naively, that I had been excused from it. I thought I’d been blessed and simply never burned out–never hit that unseen wall where all our plans and schedules and inspiration went smashing to bits.

I was wrong. And, in hindsight, I’ve had bouts of burn out plenty of times before and just didn’t recognize it. Mine sneaks up on me. It’s like the gas runs out but for a while, the wheels keep rolling and I think I’m fine. I’ve got no energy, no lust to work on my projects, no oomph to get shit done. What’s worse, I forget why I even want to do any of my projects. When I look back on the weeks of burn out, it seems like sinking but I know that when I was living it, I didn’t realize I was going down. I didn’t realize what it was at all, until I woke up from that haze of procrastination.

But, this time, I steered into it. I tried not to panic or question it. I blew February watching Netflix, listening to podcasts, reading books, and writing fanfiction. (And I went to the day job, so I wasn’t literally pajamas 24/7–but mentally I was.) My lists of to-do’s piled up and I was a ghost on social media.

Every time I’ve burned out, this time included, I’ve reached the point where I think, “Oh shit, I am never going to get anything done again. This is it. This is all I’ll ever want to do.” And it’s never been true. There comes a day, when I wake from the burn out like a storm has passed and suddenly I don’t want to watch TV or write fanfics anymore. Suddenly I have energy again and ideas for my stories and a desire to tackle social media and get out there and interact with people.

It’s taken me years to figure out, but I always come back. So, I try not to panic when I don’t have it in me to do everything–or anything. Instead, I try to listen to my body and what it needs, whether that’s a nap, or to binge watch soap operas, or write fanfics, or eat pancakes. I can’t do everything all the time. Sometimes my to-do’s pile up. And that’s okay, because I can do it later. I think the trick, for me, is recognizing and respecting my own limits and not making myself feel bad for them.

This picture below is one I took the day after I woke up from my hazy February. I think I got more done on the 1st of March than I did the whole two months before and this week I’m tackling the editing of a ghost story I wrote last October and it’s going great!  So, I’m going to leave this here for Future Me, in her next burn out, to look at and remember that she’s great at this! …But she doesn’t have to be great at it every damn day.

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INFERNAL

Infernal, my very first ever published horror book, came out last week! It’s available in paperback and eBook on Amazon and a bunch of other sites all conveniently linked below.

Please take a second to add it to your Goodreads if you use the site!

And if you do check it out and enjoy it, please leave a review! It means the world!

 

Goodreads

Amazon

Amazon UK

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

 

INFERNAL

Shrouded in Mystery

According to the legends, those who venture onto the shores of this cursed island never return.

Abandoned

Valerie DeNola and her sister Julie have chosen to ignore the legends and the warnings. They have been selected to lead a team of explorers to the island to discover the mystery surrounding it. But once ashore, they become cut off from the outside world, and what they discover is something they could never have prepared for.

Inhabited by Death

Now they must fight against an unknown presence that is picking them off one by one. No one can be trusted, and when even nature rises up against them, all seems lost. Their one hope is the extraction team they know is coming. But will any of them survive to see it arrive?

 

Published by Grinning Skull Press

Cover by Jeffrey Kosh

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