Stake Sauce ARC 2: Everybody’s Missing (Somebody) by RoAnna Sylver
Release Date: October 31, 2020
Publisher: The Kraken Collective
Genre: LGBTQIA+ Paranormal Fantasy
Synopsis:
Act 2, In Which: Our friends, some old and some new, must awaken a powerful, centuries-old magical force – before an old enemy gets there first…
Life for Jude is finally getting back to normal – or as normal as it gets when your new boyfriend has fangs, your old maybe-boyfriend isn’t dead after all (and has even bigger fangs), and everyone’s scrambling to adjust their lives accordingly.
There’s enough to worry about without evil, ancient vampires closing in, preparing dark rituals, and threatening to undo everything Jude, Pixie, and their loved ones have built together. But as they’ve all seen, normal doesn’t tend to last for long. And it’s hard to shake the feeling that something’s missing.
But then, it seems like everybody’s missing somebody.
The Witch leaned forward over the mirror, face eerily lit and cast in strange, shifting shadows from the orange fires below.
“I’m here,” she whispered, and her eerie voice sent a new wave of shivers down Jude’s spine. Jude could barely see something shining travel down her face. A tear, he realized, glittering in the firelight—but she was smiling more brightly than Jude had ever seen her, as if she’d only just now begun to hope. “I’ve always been right here, for so long. Please… come back to me.”
Now she swept the bones up, pulling them into her lap and hunching over them as if protecting something priceless and fragile. Their part was apparently done, and the rest left to the mirror. Her shoulders shook with every breath.
If the mirror was acting like a TV screen, its ‘signal’ left something to be desired. Maybe it hadn’t been fully assembled and used in centuries, or maybe it was still fragile, but the image of the stone circle soon warped and dissolved into something like static snow. The Witch began to mutter quietly but fervently under her breath, and images began to flash across the glass, fast and disorienting, from different angles. The circle from above, the bonfire in the center, the night sky as if the ‘camera’ had fallen to the ground.
Then the mirror cleared. Free of all distortion or interference, the image resolved itself into something unmistakable: a human face, grey, with bright golden eyes.
“Oh, God,” Pixie whispered, and his grip tightened on Jude’s hand so hard it almost hurt.
“That’s him?” Jude asked, though there was no mistaking the look of stunned horror on Pixie’s face. He didn’t pull his hand away, squeezing back instead.
“That’s him.” Pixie stared at the screen, as if physically unable to look away.
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RoAnna Sylver writes unusually hopeful dystopian and vampire stories about marginalized heroes actually surviving, triumphing, and rocking really hard. RoAnna is also a singer, blogger, and artist who lives with family near Portland, OR, and probably spends too much time playing videogames. The next amazing adventure RoAnna would like is a nap in a pile of bunnies.
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/RoAnnaSylver
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