In 2009 I completed work on my third novel Vortex, the first one I have serious belief could be published. It is currently being viewed by several agents. In 2010 I began work on its sequel, The Spiral Dance.
My query explains the storyline in this way:
Driven by the evolutionary imperative of a possible sixth mass extinction, a fraction of a percentage of the human race has evolved. Other than entirely human, other than normal, their "Otherness" manifests as the ability to perceive additional spatial and temporal dimensions; their "talents" include subtly manipulating quantum energies and probabilities to perform what can best be described as magic. They have always been among us, since the dawn of civilization: sometimes worshipped, often feared, but always solitary.
Now things have changed. Samantha only wants to be perfectly normal, but her life is shattered once she realizes her recurring nightmare is caused by her riding passenger within the mind of a murderer. Robert is a journalist covering the harmonic convergence when he uses his wild talent to save the life of a young woman. John is an Other who believes the world as we know it must be changed in order to save it – or perhaps be destroyed in the process. When the lives of these three people collide, being more than human may not be enough.
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Brian Lee could feel John outside the Central Presbyterian Church, waiting for Brian knew not what. He had been there for the better part of half an hour, now, watching, waiting, slowly and carefully drawing power into himself. He had collected a lot of power since he had stationed himself in Between across the street from the abandoned church, too carefully and so cunningly hidden behind a shroud of mist and confusion. Brian doubted any of the others in the church could sense it.
The others – the Others – inside the church were vampires. They were not the creatures of either myth or movie, but something else entirely: something more, something worse than ever imagined by man. They could not manipulate power the way Others of a more human sort could, but they had their own abilities and talents.
Brian knew all that better than anyone else. Brian knew because he had allowed himself to become a vampire.
But unlike so very many of those Others who had come across before him, he had retained some – most – of his former talents. Very much like Adrian had before him.
Adrian. The name evoked a great sadness in him, hardened it into a burningly cold lump of hate directed toward the man standing outside, waiting, thinking he was so damn clever. It was well past time for John Hellstrom to learn he was not omnipotent.
It would be any minute now. Although there had been no way to tell for certain what John planned for tonight, it was a sure thing he had been plotting to rid himself of Dark since the Master vampire had challenged John’s group of Others at the Melissa compound. Dark was useful to John, as long as he behaved as John thought he should, but Dark was not one to do as others said he should. Arrogant, intelligent, convinced he was better than anyone else in any room he entered, Dark was irrevocably destined to be at war with John Hellstrom. That war would undoubtedly have its casualties, and some of those would be sacrificial lambs, laid out as fodder for the greater good.
Dark wanted John to have blood on his hands. Dark wanted John to believe he had killed the North Texas nest completely. It went with the territory if you were a Seer, one of the Others who could glimpse the lines of probability and see the possible outcomes of any endeavor, that Brian should have known that Dark wanted this badly enough to make his sacrifice.
It was not within Dark’s plans for any of them to make it out of the church tonight. They would provide the blood and bodies to convince John, as well as damn him entirely.
For what seemed like the hundredth time tonight, Brian scanned the surrounding building with his augmented Other senses. He did not know exactly what he expected to find, but he expected something.
He felt the faintest touch, brushing across his senses like soft fingers making the gentlest contact with sensitive skin. Someone was using Other awareness, scanning the interior of the church.
John.
Of course it was John, because who else would it be? But what he wanted was something else entirely. Or what he was checking . . .
The first ward igniting was like a firecracker going off in a quiet room: no one but an Other could have sensed it – most of the vampires probably were not even aware of it – and it set off alarms in Brian’s brain. They were under some kind of attack, surely. The very atmosphere of the room changed imperceptibly, feeling closer, more closed off. Brian could not know it, but John had sealed the church by guarding the windows with shielding wards. Nothing, no one, could break through the fragile ninety-year old stained glass.
It was with the second set of wards detonating with a sound like a muffled thump in a register too low for human ears to detect that Brian realized what was happening. These wards had been placed at strategic locations throughout the interior and exterior of the old church with an eye toward what would cause it to go up flames the fastest. Following the sounds was the smell of charred wood and the sight of flickering orange flames, and the group of vampires went insane.
It takes a careful hand, a keen balance of biology and magic, and a fine sense of tuning the base stuff of mortal existence to create a vampire. Dark was a master of the dark art, but even he had been at short ends preparing for this sham. Even Mr. Dark, Master Vampire and Lord of the North Texas nest, would not sacrifice that entire nest in order to better prepare for revenge. With his skillful hand, he had created a flock, a group of half-vampires called revenants, to trick John. More dead than alive, more zombie than vampire, these poor wretches were intellectual imbeciles and only vampire in their most basic smell and feel to Other senses. They were, in a word, expendable.
Unfortunately, so was Brian, it appeared.
Even a flock was a force to beware of when panicked. The half-vampires milled about for several seconds before the first took it into his head to escape through a window. The spell re-enforced glass would have blunted the impact of a normal human and bounced him more or less unhurt back to the floor. A revenant was – more vehement – in its attempt to get away. The first one struck the barrier with such force that it crushed its skull and broke its neck, either of which would have been fatal. Another one leapt as far as the second floor and struck a window there, managing to break the glass with the impact, but also killing itself in the process. The glass held together within the entangled strands of force weaving the ward together.
The remaining revenants began to wail, high keening cries, as they realized their doom in their slow, decayed brains.
Brian realized he would have to do something very quickly, or he would burn to death.
There are very few things capable to causing great harm to a vampire. They may be restricted by silver, the metal grounding their particular energies. They are fatally allergic to wood. Sunlight hurts them, and makes them weaker than even mere mortals. Hard ultraviolet radiation can kill them within seconds. Wounds heal very quickly, but injuries to the heart or brain that are instantly mortal will kill them. Fire will consume them like gasoline-soaked kindling, and burns may never completely heal.
Brian had seconds to create an escape plan. Luckily, he had already formulated one. Not trusting Mr. Dark one iota, he had wondered why he had been instructed to lock himself in an abandoned church, the former headquarters of the nest, with twenty or so revenants, while assuming the form of said Mr. Dark. Why him was obvious: any vampire could shift shape – it was the natural talent of all vampires – but none could mimic Dark’s power signature except an Other, and Brian had retained his talents through his rebirth. He was also not really one of them, and therefore was disposable.
He went up, shifting into his shadow Between form and gliding on the winds howling from the depths of another dimension to the second floor landing, where he solidified and shoved bodies flowing downstairs out of his way. “Get the fuck out of my way, retards!”
Seeing Dark, sensing him, they melted out of his path.
The smoke was worse here, and the heat was beginning to become stifling. He had scouted the building before, and knew a weak point not obvious from outside the building. In a space between two support beams, water from a leak had rotted the wood of the roof, the tiles just beginning to loosen over time. Brian gathered power from the very walls around him and directed the bolt overhead, the roof buckling under the impact. A quick leap, a few well-placed blows, and the roof gave way. He climbed through the manhole sized opening and balanced on the sloping tiles.
The footing was dodgy, and the tiles were beginning to smoke in the cooling night air from the heat billowing up through the church. Brian spread his arms, the filmy membranes of his shrouded Between wings filled like sails and offered balance against the tipsy support of the roof. He glanced around, getting his bearings and scanning the darkness in the infrared spectrum.
There he was, standing in the shadows. John was illuminated by the warmth of the blood flowing in his veins, a ruddy reddish glow pulsing faintly in time to his heart. John’s Otherness was visible as a twinkling beacon centered in his chest. It would be a simple thing to leap from the rooftop and tear John’s throat out –
Muffled screams brought Brian back to reality just as a revenant shattered the glass of a window and leapt out. A thump indicated another ward being detonated, and Brian barely had time to turn his head as an expanding purple-white ball of light expanded from the window, leaving a smoking blob of unrecognizable goo smoldering in the grass. Brian grunted as the ultraviolet light seared his eyes even though closed lids, and the skin of his neck and face stung as if exposed to searing heat. There was no more time to be lost: he must leave now or perish with the others.
He whirled, spread his shadowy cloak of ectoplasm, and sailed across the intervening space to the tilted roof of the brick Pentacostal Church across the street and two stories below. From there, it was an easy drop to a gravel and concrete parking lot which let out onto Church Street.
Already, in the distance, sirens had begun to wail.
Brian knew John undoubtedly was trailing him, but that was the whole point of his assumed form, was it not? Brian flitted from one patch of shadow to another, from wall to tree to sheltering fence, working his way slowly toward the flat lawn of Finch Park. The pain from the burns on his face and neck were distracting, and his disguise had been slipping as he moved along, until near the bandstand in the park he realized it was gone entirely.
He turned to face his pursuer, still fifty yards away, and as he did so he heard the faint whisper of thought skittering through the void: “Brian.”
“Yes. You’ve missed him completely. You’ve failed.”
“I’ll find him, Brian. I have to, because we need to work together, or he needs to be neutralized.”
“You won’t find him, because he’s long gone.” Brian could not hide the gloating from his voice.
