FALLEN excerpt

by Erin McCarthy, May 2008 release

New Orleans, 1849

The sight of the rumpled bedcovers increased his fury.  The night was ruined, tainted, the idea of stepping in and escaping gone, replaced by the ugly and brutal reality that escape was ever elusive.  He had thought perhaps tonight he'd sketch after he drank, was feeling a pleasing tug of creativity, but it was all shattered by the sheets, soft and yellow with age, disheveled and stained.

Reaching over, he tore the sheets completely off, and tossed them in the corner of the room.  Mouth dry, he undid his shirt collar, and sat in his chair, sighing.  He felt tired all the time, his human body protesting the abuse he rendered it.  His tray was next to him- pipe, glass, spoon all waiting.  The bottle.  Gabriel unstopped it, poured it into the tumbler until it was half full, and reached for his spoon, the sugar already carefully resting in its well.  The shaking in his hands had stopped, and he focused with total clarity on the task, body tingling with anticipation, heart beating faster.  When he poured water over the spoon, the liquid in the glass below kicked up a deliciously beautiful cloud, and he watched it, appreciating the swirls and ebb and flow as the absinthe turned a milky white.  While it stirred and mixed and mesmerized, he struck a match and lit his pipe.  The opium took him down into a relaxing languor, the absinthe pulled him back up into sparkling awareness.  Together the two gave him a shade shy of bliss.  Between draws on his pipe, the first glass went back smoothly, settling into his limbs and easing the ache.  The second he drank just as fast, and by the time he was pouring and stirring the third, a cloud of smoke rising around him, blurring his vision and his brain, he remembered Anne, and beckoned her to him.

She went on to her knees in front of him, undoing his trousers, and stroking his bare flesh as he relaxed back, eyes closed, glass in hand.  He sipped and reached, seeking the sharpness of mind, the sense of confidence, of clarity, the absinthe brought.  It was ironic that escape could be achieved by such pure and clear thinking.  Gabriel felt more intelligent when he was in the bottle, more rational, more decisive.  Perhaps the night could satisfy him after all. 

Anne was caressing him with her hands, the tip of her tongue, the moist inside of her mouth, and the pleasure was acute, bright and crystallized, right.  Opium, absinthe, and Anne, and he was almost out of his mortality, could almost reach the pinnacle of perfection that he had known as an angel. 

Except that he was not in heaven, nor in the presence of God, but sitting in a rickety chair in a dingy room on Dauphine Street, one of the many such rooms around New Orleans, where sex was bought, and hungers of all sort satisfied for a mere sixteen cents.  He should have been ashamed that he had descended into such depths of depravity, but he no longer cared.  All that mattered was that medicinal ecstasy rushing through his veins, that pulsing in his head, that throbbing intensity that Anne's tongue and fingers drew out from his groin as she licked and sucked on his flesh.

All that pleasure, all that shattering desire coalescing into rigidity, an acute sense of self, and the need to take, to own, to feel everything, yet nothing, to be utterly in control, yet surrender, surged up in Gabriel, and he accepted the physical release.  His human body let go of its messy brand of satisfaction into Anne's mouth, and he closed his eyes, sank back, went up, then down, embracing the darkness, the incoherency, the oblivion.

When he pried his lids back open, he had no idea how much time had passed, but the candle on the night stand had burned out, the bottle was empty, and Anne was sleeping in her bed.  His mouth was dry and he reached for his glass and tossed back whatever drops of diluted absinthe were still clinging to the bottom of the cloudy glass.  There was a sour smell in the room, but Gabriel ignored it, knowing a foul odor was not out of place in The House of Rest. 

He was relaxed, still floating, his vision sharp and clear, tumbling over the familiar hulks of furniture in the room despite the dark, and he enjoyed the vision of Anne lying in bed, one arm above her head, the other carelessly abandoned at her side.  Most of her figure was in shadow, but the free arm was milky white, caught in a pool of moonlight bursting through the slats of the broken shutters on the window.  That elegant limb beckoned to Gabriel, made him struggle to reach the paper and pencil he kept next to his chair, at the ready in case he felt the urge to sketch.  He hadn't, not in months, but Anne At Rest spoke to him, and he moved his pencil quickly, capturing the bed, the hidden figure, the beautiful, illuminated arm. 

Standing up, he stretched his stiff, weak body, ignoring that all too familiar nausea, and walked towards his lover.  She was a good girl, Anne, with none of the brashness of many common whores, and she did a fine job of tolerating him.  Some nights he even suspected she felt love, such as she was capable of, for him.  He read it in her anxiety, her eagerness, that desperate desire to please.  In return he felt something like gratitude.  Now he simply wanted to capture her features, her expression, see and appreciate how her lovely worrisome face relaxed into innocence in her sleep.

Still two feet from the bed, Gabriel's boot heel slipped on the floor and he cursed, nearly going down before grabbing the bedpost for balance.  Glancing to see what had halted his progress, he saw a dark spot on the floor, raised like a puddle.  Unsure what it was, he shifted forward, his hand sliding along the side of the mattress as he leaned for a better look.  There was dampness beneath his fingers, and he realized the puddle appeared to be originating from the bed, a stained trail descending from the sheet to drip upon the floor.

Head snapping up, mouth hot, room spinning from the alcohol, Gabriel rushed his gaze past Anne's perfect arm and hand, to her face. 

Or where her face should have been. 

Unrecognizable, covered in blood, Anne was lacerated from hairline to waist with multiple stab wounds, a bowie knife placed mockingly in her other hand, her chemise and huge areas of her flesh shredded.

She was dead.

Bile rose in his throat, and he turned and spilled the contents of his stomach on the floor beside that dark circular stain of her life's blood, his heart racing, his mind registering a rapid succession of shock, horror, regret, fear.  Anne had just been alive, warm and anxiously eager to please him.  Now she was irrefutably and grotesquely dead. 

Slashed to bloody bits while he floated in a pleasure cloud of drugs. 

While he could never die, she had viciously been yanked from this mortal coil, and for him there would be no escape. 

Ever. 

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SUCKER BET Excerpt

SUCKER BET by Erin McCarthy

January 2008 release from Berkley Sensation

"What were you doing?" Alexis demanded, standing where they had been when she'd left them, glaring and juggling three drinks in her hands. 

Kelsey giggled and took a martini glass from Alexis.  "Nothing."

"We just saw those guy's penises," Gwenna confessed.  She was still trying to process the fact that four men had pulled out their packages at a rock concert just because Kelsey had asked them to.

"Oh, Lord."  Alexis rolled her eyes and swallowed half her drink, handing the remaining glass over to Gwenna.  "Oh, look, I think The Impalers are coming on to play."

Gwenna couldn't see very well because she was short and it was a standing room only concert in a nightclub.  There were some tables on the balcony to the side, but the majority of the room was just a vast crowd of heads blocking her view.  She could see the drum set and a guy with dark hair behind it messing around adjusting things.  The rest of the stage just looked crowded with instruments, mics, and amplifiers.  Absently, she took a large sip of her drink and stood on her tiptoes.

Bloody hell, the martini Alexis had got her was strong.  Her eyes were watering, which could be dangerous, given her predilection for blood tears.  She swiped at her eyes and gave a little cough.

Someone jostled her elbow.  "Hi."

It was a guy.  Another version of the jeans, black t-shirt, skull and crossbones necklace wearing shaved head guy. 

"Hey.  Is your name Slash?" she asked, deciding to hell with subtle.

"No."  He raised an eyebrow.  "But it could be if you want it to."

"No, I don't.  I hate that name.  I despise it.  If you were named Slash I was going to spit on you."

"Ooookay."  He turned and left, practically running. 

Gwenna couldn't believe she'd just done that.  She burst out laughing.  "I'm losing my mind," she told Alexis. 

"No, you just coming into your own, sister.  Go with it."

Maybe that was it.  She was coming into her own.  It was a liberating feeling.  She'd had sex on a massage table with a hottie cop, and now she was getting sloshed on a martini at a rock concert wearing a napkin for a dress.  This beat the hell out of sitting by herself in York sewing fuzzy scarves. 

"Hey."  She grabbed the arm of a guy in his young twenties walking past her.  "Are you Slash?"

"No."  He answered directly to her cleavage, which she actually had thanks to Kelsey's plunging dress.

"Oh, then you can keep walking."

"What if I don't want to keep walking?"

"You have to."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

"Oh."  He left with a disappointed look.

Gwenna was either drunk with power, or the martini that was essentially pure alcohol with a dash of apple flavoring had gone straight to her head.  The room was getting quite warm and her fingertips felt slightly numb.  By the time the band had taken the stage and performed their first set, Gwenna had plowed through two more martinis, had spoken to at least fifty guys, got propositioned multiple times, and was shown another three penises- confirming for her that all men were not created equal.  She also had her ass fondled with no idea who the culprit was, and still had yet to find the infamous and ever elusive Slash.

He was starting to tick her off.

And she was definitely drunk.  She was as drunk as her Uncle William when he'd fallen into the ale barrel and had drunk it down so he wouldn't drown without an adequate air supply.

"Who is Slash?" Alexis yelled into her ear, The Impalers blasting out a song that Gwenna thought she might recognize.  Or maybe it was just that so many songs had the word baby in them.

"I don't know who Slash is."  Which was the damn frustrating part of the whole thing.

"What?  Then why the hell are you asking all these guys if they're Slash?"

It seemed obvious to her.  "So I know if they're Slash or not."

Alexis frowned.  "You've totally lost me.  And you're drunk, by the way."

"I know.  It's kind of nice."  Fuzzy.  Warm.  Making her horny.

"Your brother is going to shoot me."

"So?"  Gwenna drained her fourth martini, damn proud of herself for going to the bar and ordering it herself.  "It's not like a bullet would kill you.  And Ethan needs to stop treating me like a child.  I'm a grown woman and I can make my own decisions."

Her "s" in decisions did a monstrous slur.  Okay, so she couldn't manage to say decisions right at the moment, but she was still capable of making them.

"I totally applaud making your own decisions.  If they're good ones."

"Don't be so critical, Alexis, that really makes me sad."

"I'm sorry, but please, can you just lay off the martinis and stop talking to strange men?"

That sounded boring, but she nodded, not wanting to argue.

"Hey, let's try to run up on stage," Kelsey said, her hips jiggling to the music.

"Okay."  Gwenna handed her martini to Alexis.  If she was up on stage, she could scan the crowd for Slash.  Even though she had no clue what he looked like, somehow the logic made sense to her martini soaked brain.

Her sister-in-law sputtered.  "No!  Bad decision.  Bad, bad, bad.  You're going to get thrown out!"

"Nah.  I know half the guys in the band," Kelsey said.  "And I had sex with the bass player back in the sixties.  It's cool."

"See?"  That sounded highly encouraging to Gwenna.  "Kelsey knows the band."

And she proceeded to follow Kelsey through the crowd, weaving and smiling and dancing with concert goers as they made their way to the front.  Getting past the bouncers was a snap, since they were mortal.  She and Kelsey just fast walked, vampire speed, between two of them on the side, and then leaped on stage. 

Wow.  It was hot and bright up there.  And loud.

Kelsey pulled her behind the guitar player and turned sideways.  She swayed to the music and made a few "oh, yeah, oh, whoo, ooh" sounds at appropriate times in the music.

Back-up singers in a rock band.  Brilliant. 

Gwenna turned and did the same.  This was kind of fun.  The guitar player glanced back and looked them up and down, amusement on his face. 

The bouncers didn't have the same loving feeling towards them.  Gwenna felt a meaty arm encircle her stomach, and she was contemplating using her strength to break free when she glanced to the side and saw a very familiar face.

"Nate!"  She waved as the bouncer lifted her completely off her feet.  "What brings you by?"  Not that he could hear her, but she was delighted to see him, and his very handsome face. 

He looked a bit off put though.

She wondered why that was. 

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Demon Envy Excerpt

Excerpt from Demon Envy by Erin Lynn

8:54 AM - 4 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment