Teaser Tuesday #4

Another spoiler free excerpt from Chiaroscuro. This one is for the setting:

Ari was positive she heard wrong, yet Lee was the one looking disturbed by the eye contact. Maybe she hadn’t said it loud enough. It had been a while since someone had commentated on the level of her voice.The bottle of water crinkled between Lee’s fingers. “What?”Ari cleared her throat. “Should I say it a little louder?”“Do I look like I need a hearing aid?”“Um, then, why aren’t you freaking out?”Lee lowered the bottle and smiled. The expression made Ari want to jump a little, but the presence behind her was too acute for her to even step back. “Well, if you wanted me to freak out about this, then maybe I should freak out about the fact that your boyfriend can somehow tear the heart out of a human body. Or maybe I should freak out about the fact that there are zombies running around my countryside, powered by high levels of energy coursing under my feet. Or - or - maybe I should freak out about the fact that the world’s ended, Britain’s infrastructure shot, and I’ve had to decapitate people in ways Henry the eighth would be proud of to survive.” Her grin glittered against her dark skin. “Where do you want me to start?”Clearing her throat a second time, Ari said, “Considering that you’ve had much more time to adjust to all that, Aza aside, I don’t see how you can correlate learning about the existence of magic with—”Enough disgust soaked Lee’s expression to shut Ari up without her speaking. “Never mind. Just get cleaned so we can get out of here. And preferably to find some more alcohol.”

Happy Tuesday!

Teaser Tuesday #3

Taking a break from my usual excerpts of Dance Macabre, here's one from the first draft of Chiaroscuro. Ari and Lee, my co-protagonists, have just stopped fighting - or sparring, as Lee would call it - because Ari suddenly started coughing like someone dying:


“So that’s your cost, then?” 
Even with Lee’s face cast partly in shadows, Ari could still see the little cut her one and only strike had made at the corner of Lee’s mouth. What she couldn’t make out was her expression, and Lee did have a track recording of saying one thing and feeling another thing.
“The cost of my magic?” Ari said carefully. 
“No, the cost of the car we’re driving in. Stop staring.” 
She switched hands on the bottle, keeping from the urge to clear her throat. “Sorry. No. The cost isn’t torture.” 
“Oh.” The disappointment in Lee’s voice had the plastic under Ari’s fingers crinkling. “Then what the hell was that just now?” 
“Part of it.” 
“There’s more?” 
Ari licked her lips. The water hadn’t washed away the sharpness of blood at all. “I don’t really feel comfortable talking about it.” 
“That’s nice. Wish I could feel comfortable about the fact that I'm traveling with a demon and a witch across post-apocalypse England.”


Happy Tuesday!