So the release of Spell Blind (book I of the Case Files of Justis Fearsson) is just a few days off — January 6, from Baen Books — and I haven’t even offered a teaser yet!! Time to rectify that. This is the opening. More to come . . .
Ask most people to point at the moon, and they’ll lift their gaze
skyward, trying to locate it. Ask the same of a weremyste like me, and we don’t have to search for it. We know where it is. Always, and precisely. As it waxes full, we can feel it robbing us of our sanity and enhancing the strength of our magic. Like ocean tides, our minds and our runecraft are subject to its pull.
I was on the interstate cutting across the outskirts of Phoenix, and already I could feel the moon tugging at my thoughts, subtle and light, but as insistent as a curious child. Three hours before today’s moonrise, nearly a week before it would wax full, and its touch was as real to me as the leather steering wheel against my palms, the rush of the morning desert air on my face and neck.
I sensed the reservoir of power within me responding to its caress, like water to gravity. And I felt as well the madman lurking inside my head, coaxing the moon toward full, desperate to be free again. I had five days.
And in the meantime, I had work to do.
Work for me means investigating. Once it meant being a detective for the Phoenix Police Department, but those days are gone. I was on the job for six years and eight months. The day I turned in my badge was, next to the day twenty years ago when my mother died, the worst of my life. Still, when I look in the mirror, I see a cop, a detective. I’ve heard it said among cops that once you’re on the job, you’re never really off. Some things are like that, they’ll tell you. Some things get in your blood and that’s it. You’re never the same.