First page of Bewitched & Betrayed

Whew! I meant to have posted this earlier this morning, but apparently I needed that ten hours of sleep. Need to get on the treadmill to wake myself up. I REALLY want to knock out four chapters of edits this weekend. I'll try to get there, but if I don't, I'll know I did my best -- it's the attempt/goal that counts.

As promised, here's the first page of my work-in-progress -- Bewitched & Betrayed. While The Trouble with Demons will be out on April 28, B&B won't be out until NEXT April. For those of you who can't stand the torment of waiting that long to read the rest of the story, avert your eyes now. ; ) The rest of you . . . enjoy!

I was being chased by a pissed off naked guy with a knife. A really big knife.

He being naked was expected since I was doing my ducking, weaving, and dodging down a hall in the Isle of Mid's finest bordello. You'd think that the worst that could happen to me was acute embarrassment and possible death. But this naked guy was possessed by the specter of a three-thousand-year-old, evil elven sorcerer who'd turned Mid's red-light district into his personal playground. I'd interrupted recess, and he was mad as hell.

My name is Raine Benares, and I'm a seeker. Tonight I'd found what I was looking for, as well as things I never wanted to see. The men who frequented The Satyr's Grove were here because they had money, not muscle tone. These weren't your finer specimens of manhood. And believe me, I got to see enough manhoods and fleeing pasty white posteriors to last me a lifetime.

Even worse, the sorcerer's specter had picked himself a young, fit, and fast body, not an old, flabby, and slow one. But on the upside, apparently slinging spells was a challenge when wearing someone else's skin. Hence the big knife and bad attitude.

There were screams, shouts, and chaos from the first and second floors. We now had the third floor hallway all to ourselves. Everyone had either fled downstairs, or barricaded themselves in the bedrooms that lined the hall. Unfortunately in The Satyr's Grove, the more expensive ladies were on the top floor, and our quarry had decided to splurge. I'd gotten separated from my Guardian bodyguards in the stampede of working girls and clients on the two floors below. I couldn't stop to wait for them. I'd been tracking this specter all week; I'd found him, and he was not getting away.

We'd had a plan, a good plan, but like most plans I'd been involved with lately, it'd gone straight down the crapper moments after implementation. I was upstairs, the specter was upstairs, but the man with the containment box to trap the specter was somewhere in the chaos downstairs.

Crap.