I uploaded the interior file for A Silver Cross and a Winchester to Createspace today. We’ll have a cover soon, and shortly after that, it will be out. In the meantime, here’s another short snippet.
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The Senator’s body hitting the grass didn’t let down her sacrificial victim. He still hovered in the air, bound with the unnatural cords, his eyes still rolled back in his head. Only now his head lolled around to stare at me with unseeing eyes. “Too…late…” croaked out of his open mouth, without any movement of his lips or jaws. “Mine…now…”
I levered another round into the Winchester’s chamber, and leveled the gold bead sight on his heart, reciting a prayer of exorcism. The body jerked and danced like a puppet, but did not lower, and the black tendrils only tightened. “No…mine…”
“Go back where you came from,” I demanded. “Or I’ll send you there with a quickness, and it’ll hurt a lot more.” I didn’t really want to shoot the poor sucker who was the chosen vessel for this thing, but if that was the way to keep the demon in the Abyss, you’d better believe I’d drop the hammer on him.
Of course, the security detail chose that moment to come racing around the corner in response to the gunshot.
The first guy skidded to a stop in shock, his Glock held out in front of him but completely forgotten as he stared at the young man floating in the air over the table. The victim’s head swiveled around unnaturally quickly—and further around than a human head should be able to—to face him. A thick tendril of the same spiky, oily black smoke-stuff that was bound around the young man shot out of the open mouth like a tongue, and wrapped around the guard’s neck.
No choice. I fired, smashing another huge, silver-jacketed bullet through the boy’s heart.
Now, there was a fifty-fifty chance that things had progressed far enough that the thing didn’t need a living body to possess. That’s rare, but it does happen. I’d never seen it, at least not up to that point. With an unearthly scream that had the guards falling on their hands and knees, vomiting, the unnatural cords evaporated, and the corpse fell to the tabletop with a sickening dead-meat noise.
The guard who had been attacked was insensate, staring up at the sky. He was still breathing, but he wouldn’t come out of his shock for a long time. I suspected that when he did, he wouldn’t be entirely whole anymore. The others were starting to pick themselves up, shaking, wondering what the hell had just happened.
By the time they looked around, I’d scooped up my shell casings and was gone.