~Sherry
Other Books By Sherry D. Ramsey
To Unimagined Shores - Collected Stories
ISBN: 978-0-9811025-4-2
From Tyche Books (www.tychebooks.com)
One's Aspect to the Sun
ISBN:978-0-9918369-5-6
Author's Note & Acknowledgements
Like many (most) of my novels, the first draft of The Murder Prophet came into being one November during National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org). I had written the first drafts of several novels during previous Novembers, and this one year I wanted to do something different and didn't have a novel in mind to write. So I decided that, as an experiment, I would use online generators to guide many aspects of the book, and see what happened.
It started with the title. I had no story idea to start with, and the entire novel grew out of the title, The Murder Prophet, which came from an online generator. I used generators to come up with many of the character and place names, items in the novel, ideas, plot twists—you name it. Any time I was stuck for an idea, I went to the generators to see what they would come up with. Although I expanded and refined the story in the course of several revisions, the novel stayed very true to that first draft.
I think the experiment was a success! I'm currently at work on a second novel in the series I've decided to call Magica Incognita, so there are more adventures ahead for Kit and the others.
Many people had a hand in helping me out with this novel, but I'd like to send out special thanks to my husband, Terry, who gave me a sounding board on which to work out some sticky plot details in revision; my partners, colleagues, and first readers and editors Julie Serroul and Nancy Waldman; more early readers, my sisters Denise Howatson and Krista Miller; and insightful critique-swap partner Kevin S. Moul.
For ongoing feedback, input, and support in all aspects of the writing life, thanks to my writing colleagues in The Story Forge and The Quillians.
And for support in all aspects of life, thanks to my family and friends, near and far.
About the Author
Sherry D. Ramsey is a speculative fiction writer, editor, publisher, creativity addict and self-confessed internet geek. When she's not writing, she makes jewelry, gardens, hones her creative procrastination skills on social media, and consumes far more coffee and chocolate than is likely good for her.
Her debut novel, One's Aspect to the Sun, was published by Tyche Books in late 2013 and was awarded the Book Publishers of Alberta "Book of the Year" Award for Speculative Fiction. The sequel, Dark Beneath the Moon, is due out from Tyche in 2015. Her other books include To Unimagined Shores—Collected Stories. With her partners at Third Person Press, she has co-edited five anthologies of regional short fiction to date.
Visit her at www.sherrydramsey.com, find her Writing News page on Facebook, or keep up with her much more pithy musings on Twitter @sdramsey.
A Sneak Preview of the next
Magica Incognita novel by Sherry D. Ramsey:
The Chaos Assassin
CHAPTER ONE
Not-So-Accidentally Dead
I knew a split second before the phone rang that it was about to do just that. These brief flashes of prescience had been happening with irregular frequency lately. It might be the phone, a knock at the door, the next word to come out of someone else's mouth in a conversation. I knew it had to be a latent-developing magic talent rising like a sea monster from the depths of my mind—or my spleen, or my lungs, or wherever it was that magic ability in humans had lain dormant for millenia, before the asteroid spores woke them up.
I hated it. I had quite enough magic problems already, thank you very much.
But I answered the phone anyway, audio only.
"Kit, can you come over? As soon as possible?" Nana Nina's voice on the other end was peremptory and sounded worried, which in itself was unusual. She was usually the soul of gentleness. I punched the button for video, and her dear, concerned face shimmered onto the screen. Her blue eyes, usually twinkling and mischievous under her cap of white hair, were dark with worry.
"Nana? Of course! What's wrong?" I was already slipping my feet into runners as I spoke, and pulled open the closet door to grab my windbreaker. The leaves had begun their slow transformation from green to red and gold, and the wind held a little more chill each day lately.
She blew out a sigh and her face relaxed a little. "Oh, wonderful, dear. I'll put on some coffee. See you in a few minutes."
She hung up without answering my question and I groaned in frustration. Nana Nina was the dearest person in the world to me, but she could annoy the hell out of me when she wanted. And she obviously didn't intend to tell me a thing until I was standing inside her apartment door.
"Kit, is everything okay?" Phoebe, my apartment computer AI kept a closer eye than I’d like on my comings and goings. Especially since her recent transformation into something—more—by her interaction with the ambient Netz magic. It creeped me out, but there seemed to be nothing I could do about it.
"No, but I don’t know what’s going on yet. I’ll tell you as soon as I know myself," I told her, and shut the apartment door behind me. At least she couldn’t follow me outside.
Yet.
Since it seemed urgent, I took a magicab. I don't like the fuzzy way the magic-teleporters make my head feel, but for Nana Nina, I'd endure a few moments of discomfort.
Fifteen minutes later I climbed the stairs to Nana's apartment and knocked on the door. The enticing coffee aroma wafting into the hallway had met me as soon as I stepped off the elevator. And a distinct undertone of cinnamon rolls. I knew damn well she hadn't had time to make those from scratch, so she must have used magic.
My nana is a Spellquick; she has the ability to access all the categories of known magic. The rest of us have varying degrees of ability—or none at all—depending on, I guess, what was latent in our brains at the time the asteroid spores blanketed the earth, and for babies now, whatever they're born with. Spellquicks generally keep their wide-ranging ability quiet, and they run a secret network composed only of themselves. I'd learned of Nana Nina's abilities only a few months previously, when a case I'd been on had necessitated her revealing her magic capabilities to me. I'd had to reveal a few secrets of my own at the time, and I was still dealing with the repercussions of that.
Nana opened the door just as I raised my hand to knock, and pulled me into a quick hug. I had time to notice that her eyes were bright with unshed tears, however, and when she released me, I held her at arm's length.
"What. Is. Wrong."
She patted my arm and shook her head, glancing up and down the hallway. "Come in, Kit, we'll sit and have a chat."
She closed and locked the door behind me. That was weird.
Chatting about inconsequential things, she led me into the corner of her loft-style apartment that held the kitchen and poured up two steaming mugs of coffee. I'd been right about the cinnamon rolls, I noted as I added cream and sugar to mine; a nearby plate held a stack of glazed beauties. Magically-produced or not, I knew they'd be delicious and snagged one before Nana picked up the plate and led us into the brightly-colored living room area.
Nana took her favorite armchair, and I took my favorite one, across from her. I tucked my feet up under myself, took a nibble of cinnamon roll and a sip of coffee, and said, "All right, Nana. What's up?"
She took a sip of her own coffee, then pulled a deep breath and looked at me. Her lower lip quivered just slightly before she pulled herself together and said, "Someone's killing off Spellquicks."
I stopped with my mug halfway to my lips. "What? How is that even possible?"
She shook her head and tsk-tsked at me. "You know very well that Spellquicks aren't invincible, Kit," she said, peering over the top of her half-moon glasses like an admonishing schoolteacher. "We have our weaknesses, just like everyone else."
I chuckled. "Spellquicks are not 'just like everyone else' in any sense of the word, but of course, you're right.
But why haven't I heard about this before now? A bunch of dead Spellquicks should be big news."
Nana Nina simply stared at me over the tops of her glasses, smiling indulgently, while she waited for my brain to catch up with my mouth.
The light bulb came on, admittedly a little dim. "Oh. Right. No-one else knows they're Spellquicks."
"Except the rest of us, of course," Nana said with a sharp little nod.
"But it must be awfully difficult to sneak up on a Spellquick and—do whatever someone's doing," I managed to protest. "You've got every type of magical ability there is, to protect yourself."
Nana Nina shrugged, an elegant gesture on her tiny, birdlike form. "Every type we know about," she corrected, "But you are right, Kit. It shouldn't be easy, and it shouldn't be happening with this much frequency."
I pulled a deep sigh, setting my coffee mug down on the little table beside me, and dug around in my bag for a notebook and pen. It would be nice to have a magically-enhanced memory, but that ability is definitely not in my repertoire. Not that I'm really complaining. My repertoire is already bigger than I want it to be.
I poised the pen. "So, who were they?"
Nana Nina levered herself up from the chair, keeping her coffee steady and not spilling a drop as she began to pace around the apartment. She didn't answer me right away, and I realized with a shock that she was fighting back tears. My own heart thudded against my ribs. I'd never seen Nana Nina this discombobulated in my life. She generally took things in her stride, took charge, and did what had to be done. I kept silent, giving her time, but after a few seconds I started doodling randomly on the page so she wouldn't feel me staring at her.
"Usta Smith was the first," she said finally. Her hands were wrapped around her mug as if trying to draw comfort and warmth from the china. Her knuckles were white but her voice was steady. "Three months ago. Just when you were working on the Murder Prophet case," she added.
"Did she live here?"
Nana Nina shook her head. "Condo in Florida."
"What happened to her?"
A long moment of silence. Then, "She was eaten by an alligator."
I stopped writing and looked up. "That's a hell of a roundabout way to kill someone, isn't it?"
Nana Nina shrugged. "If you're dealing with Spellquicks, you would have to be a bit creative," she said. "Many of the usual methods are simply not going to work."
I nodded. "You might see it coming in a vision, or be able to use magic to stop a bullet or a knife."
"Or read the mind of the killer in time to avoid them, or...or...or"
"Right. But an alligator accident—"
"Could be just random enough to work."
Or random enough to not be murder at all, I thought, but I didn't say it. Nana had stopped pacing, but now she stood in front of an easel, staring at a half-finished painting as if I weren't even in the room.
"Okay, who was next?" I prompted her.
She didn't take her eyes off the work-in-progress. "Allaster Renfrew," she said. "Lived here in New Kendrickson. Hit by a hovercar six weeks ago."
"Another accident," I said, jotting down the details.
"Apparently."
"Did the police look into these deaths at all?" I asked her.
She shrugged. "I don't think so. No more than a cursory investigation at the time they happened, at any rate."
"How many more are there?"
She finally turned away from the easel and came back to her chair, sitting down carefully, still holding the mug like a lifeline. "Two more," she said. "Naraine Buttersmith, in Paris—"
"Choked on a baguette?" I said before I could stop myself. This really wasn't anything to joke about, and Nana Nina was truly upset, but I tend to make inappropriate jokes when I'm nervous, and Nana was making me nervous. Very nervous.
Nana Nina frowned at me. "Croissant," she corrected. I didn't laugh.
"Okay. And?"
Nana Nina bit her lip and looked at me steadily, her blue eyes unreadable. Then she pulled a deep sigh and said, "Evangeline Coro."
I almost dropped my pen. "Evangeline Coro? What in the world happened to her?"
The previous spring I'd helped save billionaire Aleshu Coro's life, when his estranged and unbalanced ex-wife Evangeline had tried to kill him and cover up the deed with a string of mysterious murders. As far as I knew, she'd been locked away in a special prison for her misdeeds, a place where her magic abilities would be suppressed and she wouldn't pose a danger to herself or anyone else.
Nana cocked her head at me, looking almost birdlike. "Supposedly, a heart attack."
"But you don't believe that."
She shook her head. "Look, Kit, I know, she's an older woman, obviously under a lot of stress, in a horrible situation. But I have it on very good authority that she was in excellent health less than a week before she died."
I pursed my lips. "One of your Spellquick connections?"
She nodded. "Travelling doctor in the prison system."
I sat back in my chair and blew out a long sigh. "So, what do you want me to do? Are you worried about your own safety?"
Nana Nina glanced automatically towards the locked apartment door and shrugged. "A little, maybe. But mainly, I want to know what's going on. It's not only me; a lot of my friends could be in danger."
"And the Spellquick network is more important than most people know," I added. Nana Nina had confided to me during the Coro case that the Spellquicks had the ability to detect the magical abilities of others, which most people didn't know about, including most of the people who thought they ran things. The Spellquicks didn't want power, but they did ensure, for one thing, that governments didn't force citizens to use their magic abilities in ways they didn't want to. I, for one, was heartily glad about that.
"There is that," Nana agreed with a smile.
"Okay." I put the notebook and pen back in my bag and stood, taking my mug to the kitchen. I rinsed it out in the sink and set it on the drying rack. Nana Nina followed me out and did the same.
"Do you think you can do anything?"
I leaned down and pulled her into a quick hug. I'd always thought of her as small but mighty, but suddenly she felt a little frail in my arms. "I can definitely start by looking into the deaths that occurred here," I told her, pulling back. "There's not much going on at the office right now, so no-one's going to notice if I do a bit of investigating on the side."
Nana shook her head. "I'll hire the firm properly if you think there's any point," she said. "I just wanted to see what your reaction would be first, before I went any further. This isn't just a favour to me, it's a real job, so we'll do it right. Set up an appointment for me with your bosses, and I'll come in and tell them about it, too."
I would have protested further, but the steely gleam I knew so well was back in her eyes. I knew it would be a waste of breath.
"Okay, I'll text you a time when I've talked to Anna and Saga tomorrow," I said. "Until then, keep your door locked, okay?"
She nodded. "I will. I despise feeling like a prisoner in this apartment, much as I love it. I hope we can get to the bottom of this soon."
I planted a kiss on her forehead. "We will. Promise," I told her, and stood outside in the hallway until I heard the locks on her door click into place. I had no doubt she was adding some magical wards as well, but she didn't need me to tell her to do that. She was the Spellquick. I was just a lowly Psych who could tell when people were lying, and a Transmute who could turn things into other things. That last only when it was absolutely, positively necessary, because the headaches and nausea that came with transmutation were the stuff of nightmares.
The thought of Nana Nina in danger was worse than any nightmare, though. I was definitely going to have to do something about that.
From.Net
The Murder Prophet Page 25