NaNoWriMo 2012: Synopsis and Excerpt from WIP novel, Kill Creek Road

Author: amandagaelic

Genre: Horror & Supernatural

Synopsis

Leo Murphy is a good cop. But one mistake blows a hole right through his future and he is left with a new normal, seeking balance in a world that doesn't fit him anymore.

Noah Kincade is a hunter; a very specialized hunter. And he's been after one specific prey for a very long time. It's cost him everything -- his livelihood, his relationships, his humanity -- but he is determined to end this hunt on his terms.

In a "Cold Case" meets "Supernatural" story of two men whose paths are destined to cross, fate orchestrates a set of circumstances that forces each to make a choice. 

And the outcome of this choice will cascade through both the future and the past.

Excerpt

Dawn felt different from night.

It peeled back the tangible dark as if the world was shucking a cloak, letting it pool to the base of the earth as the sun clawed its way to dominate a bruised sky. Sounds that had stilled at twilight returned with hesitant energy as the scouting rays climbed the horizon. The world seemed to take a breath.

And with that breath, Noah opened his eyes.

Immediately in his line of sight, a raven perched on the porcelain-white prone shoulder of a slim woman, pulling pink, stringy tendrils of flesh from the blunted end of her neck. Noah blinked, working to assimilate the image with memory. The cement beneath his cheek was burred, rubbing a painful imprint along the side of his face. Silently, he pressed a hand against the wet ground of the alley he lay in and lifted his face to look up and to his left. 

There lay her head, features slack, mouth opened as if calling out, eyes a cloudy white where death had rolled them to view the interior of her own skull. Her hair had been long and blonde, he registered, and the cut had shorn it to what would have been her shoulders, the rest of it lying in a wig-like heap nearby. Blinking slowly, Noah lowered his gaze once more to the woman’s body, arms flung from her sides, fingers still clawed in the act of reaching for him, blood staining the front of her shirt.

“Hey,” he growled at the bird. 

Beady black eyes regarded him. He pressed his hand against the concrete, leveraging his body upright with a low groan. His side burned, momentarily stealing his breath. He moved with uncooperative limbs, managing to get his legs around front of him, before finding the bird once more. It’s image wavered in the half-light of the gray morning, and then, mercifully, everything stilled. 

“Git.”

The bird tilted its head, then returned to savaging flesh from the body, apparently unconcerned.

Noah slumped back against one of the brick walls that framed the alley where he and the body shared space. Shoving out a foot, he kicked at the shoulder, rocking the bird’s perch and sending it skyward with an irritated cry.

“Go nevermore someplace else,” Noah grumbled, dropping his head back against the wall. 

He pulled in a slow breath, realizing only then that the stench of the garbage from the side-by-side green dumpsters on the wall opposite him masked the smell of the blood covering a good amount of the ground around him. Dropping his gaze, he stared at the stained cement – mainly because looking at the head was a bit too disturbing at the moment – and tried to remember how he’d ended up leaning against this wall, covered in blood, with his side on fire and a decapitated body at his feet.

He’d never had the best memory. There were entire days that he couldn’t recall, liquor and sleepless nights having rubbed out their imprint. There were faces of women who’d lain next to him for the space of a night that he’d pass by in a crowd without even a glimmer of recognition. There were roads he’d travel twice because he didn’t realize he’d been there before.

But he usually remembered those he killed.