The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Something happens and I'm Headless Over Heels.

Today's shout is going on top, cause it's a personal one.

My dear friend, reader, and fellow author E.E. Sharp has begun serialization of Baron & Zombie, a historical fantasy espionage thriller set during the Cold War. If you read my stuff, you're already looking for stories outside the usual beaten path of Royal Road's standard fare. Give this a follow.

I've been saving my first experience of this story for Royal Road, and now that it's begun, I am thrilled to report it's been absolutely worth the wait so far. Fearlessly weird, lyrically written, immediately intriguing, and with the specificity of time-and-place I always look for in an Urban Fantasy. I'll be keeping up with it as it pubs, and I give it a hearty rec and a suggestion you do the same.

Baron and Zombie

Baron & Zombie

by E.E. Sharp

Prestige is power. Toil for the gods, make a wish, and receive a miracle.

New York City, the spring of 1952. Secular power is ascendant, and atomic weaponry casts a long shadow over the Earth. Yet secret cults still influence the course of nations. Cultists pull strings and slit throats, using money and magic to empower their vast conspiracies.

An elite Soviet assassin vanishes with the Cat o' Nine Lives, an ancient artifact which grants its bearer the right to die nine deaths. In desperation, a waning faction of the Soviet cult hires the ageless madman-philosopher Baron d'Holbach and his invincible right hand, the Zombie. Their task? Recover the artifact in secrecy, on American soil, before the world learns the Cat is gone.

If they fail, then a carefully managed balance of power will collapse, the Cold War will turn hot, and nuclear armageddon will soon follow.

What to expect:

- A fully-written book - 270k words total!

- Complicated Cold War politics, where no side seems right but your own.

- Realistic alt Earth with deep history and myth.

- Philosophy. Steep odds demand moral choices.

- Wish-based magic powers!

Start Reading ►

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“You told me if I said to, you’d give up,” she said.

“I told Annalise that, and I stand by it. Your other heads I’m taking with a grain of salt.”

“So you’re just going to ignore me? That’s your strategy?”

“Not ignoring you,” he said. “I’m listening. You’re scared.”

“Scared?”

“You’re scared that I’m treating this like a fling when you want something bigger out of it,” he said. “And I can’t make you un-scared by talking. Not while you’re Anna, anyway.”

“Fuck off, thief. I’m scared? I obliterated a seraph in its cave in front of you while you cried and shit your pants, and I’m scared. You don’t know shit about me. My other heads are too fucking nice—”

“Shhh.”

“Don’t you fucking shush me—”

I see something.

Seth was full of hushed urgency and glued to his binoculars. “I see something.”

Her tuft-tipped ears quivered. “What?”

“Group of kindred with corpselamps.” He frowned. “Thought we were looking for a seraph. What are these guys doing here?”

“Show me,” Anna said. Seth held the binoculars to her eyes. She peered through and blinked them away. “Can’t turn my neck, thief. Hold me straight.”

“I’m trying.” Seth changed his grip on her. His hand slid below and held her there, like a penny-dreadful actor soliloquizing at a skull.

“Fuck’s sake,” she ground out, through the mouth he was holding partway closed.

“Don’t jostle. It’s a long way down.” His thumb laid along the line of her jaw, sinking into her cheek and pooching her lips forward. Thank St. Silas that her jugular was on her body down below so he couldn’t feel her pulse pick up. Of course it did. That’s what happens when someone has their hand near your neck.

It wasn’t oakmoss, the smell on his hands. Tobacco leaf, maybe. Focus.

Four men whose dark clothes blended with the colors of the gathering evening and oncoming autumn. They were trying to look hard for one another, to seem unbothered by the strange and dire business that had drawn them here. The most successful was in front, big and bald and bearded, a hooded lantern held in his hairy-backed hand. Amber light coming out of that, not the green of a corpselamp that a seraph might siphon; he knew what he was coming here to meet. The subtle hitch in his stride told her here was a veteran of violence, and she wondered from where. She could scarcely imagine a fellow baptized in the carnage of the Winter War could return and worship the butcher-birds.

“Seraph cult,” she said. “Coming to meet their master.”

He drew a sharp inhale. “Saints, really?”

“What else’d they be? This is what Tiago and I pieced together in Sondam. What that scarecrow got mixed up in. How’d you think we knew where to look?”

“I never… I guess I knew they existed, I thought they were out on the edges of the world. Like in Sektorbrav, or…”

She sneered at his hesitation. “Or Orwiny?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re here, too. More and more. Nihilists, madmen, worshippers of some Antisaint or another. These fuckers, though.” She shook her head, and then remembered her body was on the forest floor, shaking its severed neck. “Turning on your own people for a gray feather is fucking low-rent. Find the seraph. Should be coming in from the southwest, along that switchback.”

Seth returned her to his lap and peered back through the binoculars. A probing minute and then his body stiffened. “Saints preserve. There it is.”

“Show,” she commanded, and she was in the air again, staring down the binoculars at a shambolic thing that looked halfway direwolf and halfway vulture, with a scabby, bulbous head perched on a body so cruelly striated with animal muscle it looked as though it were a wound winch, a quivering tensile knot of quadrupedal muscle that’d snap and whirl apart if it weren’t lashed to bones the size of staves.

“That thing looks more like a big dumb beast than a deity,” Seth said.

Anna blew a lock of silver hair out of the way. “Yokels are dumber.”

“But if this guy was part of it, what made him turn unlit? Is there something more going on, maybe?”

“Maybe. I don’t care. Fanatics don’t interest me other than they’ve got enough soul for the sword.”

“We gonna try taking one alive? Make him talk?”

“Stop acting like you know what you’re doing, il Gutierre,” she said. “There’s four of them plus a seraph, and three of us. Focus on coming out of this, and if one of them lives long enough to spout his horseshit, it’s a pleasant bonus before we lop his head off. Understand?”

He slow-blinked. His eyelashes were long, for a man. Long and dark. “You want me in this?”

“The fuck do you think? You said you’d live the life, this is the life. I need hands.”

“Okay. But promise—”

“Not promising anything.”

“Stop,” he hissed, and to her surprise, she did. “Promise you’ll use me how I should be.”

“And how’s that?”

“You’re the one who kills people,” he said. “You decide, and I’ll trust you. But promise.”

She sighed. The wind whistled through the hexis-limned hole in her neck. “I promise,” she said. “Coward.”

He smiled that dimply smile. “Thank you.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...eraph-cult
CORRECTION: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2425468/

Thank you for reading!

June's over, so starting next week we'll be going from an every-day cadence to a 3/week one, updating Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. We'll have one more chapter for you tomorrow and then the changeover'll happen.