As I mentioned last week, I’ll be counting down to the November 5th release date for See These Bones by sharing chapters from the book. Chapter 1 is a short one, but I think it gets everything started on the right foot.
CHAPTER 1
My mom was murdered when I was five.
The good news is they caught her killer. The bad news? It was my dad. Any shrink will tell you that’s the sort of thing that can fuck a kid up.
By the time my sixth birthday rolled around, both parents were in the ground; Mom in a quiet cemetery on the other side of town and Dad in the considerably less quiet prison the Free States built for people like him.
And people like me, I guess.
Turns out dark hair and grey eyes aren’t the only things that asshole and I have in common.
My mom was murdered when I was five. I didn’t see her again until I turned nine, but ever since then, she’s made a habit of following me around. Losing your virginity to the girl who works the slushy counter down the block is stressful enough without the ghost of your dead mother bearing witness.
Now, there was a time when even talking about ghosts earned someone a padded cell and a lifetime supply of medication. But that was before things went bad. Before Dr. Nowhere broke the world. These days, stories like mine divide neatly into two camps; the people who see the dead because they’re batshit crazy and the people who are batshit crazy because they see the dead.
That second group? We call them Crows and they don’t just see the dead. You’ve heard the stories. Lord Bone and his skeletal army. Gravedigger’s circle of elementary school sacrifices. The Crimson Death’s march through the blood-soaked heart of Reno. And Sally Cemetery… well, everyone knows about Sally.
But those are just the big names. There are a dozen others that nobody has ever heard of, people whose body counts weren’t high enough to merit a vid, whose atrocities failed to catch the nation’s eye. Necromancers who only snuffed out a handful of souls. Or maybe just one.
Crows like my dad.
Crows like me.
We all go mad. That’s just how it is. The weaker among us—the Ones, the Twos—end up in asylums with the everyday lunatics, one more flavor of crazy for the nuthouse. But the true Crows, the Threes and Fours who somehow survive to adulthood?
Villains. Black Hats. Murderers.
Every. Damn. One of us.
Which is what made my admittance to the Academy of Heroes so unexpected.
But my expulsion from that same institution?
Everyone saw that coming.
See These Bones releases November 5th, and is now available for pre-order in digital format!
Later this week, I’ll be sharing some BTS shots from the filming of last week’s live-action trailer, as well as what the process was like, what I liked and what went horribly awry. Next Tuesday, I’ll be back with Chapter 2, which may start to explain what the heck is going on. (Then again, it might not… There are unreliable narrators, but the main character for See These Bones is both unreliable and uncooperative. I like him anyway.)
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