DevinHarnois.com

Woo-hoo! Last night I crossed the 50,000 word mark, meaning that for the third year in a row, I won NaNoWriMo! I wrote almost six thousand words yesterday AFTER working at the day job. It was hard, and exhausting, and I’ll probably not want to do that in the future, but of course the bright side is that I’ve won, and now I can relax. I’m going to keep writing, to hit my personal goal of writing every day in November, but it doesn’t matter how many words each day. I could write one, and that would still count. (I’ll probably end up with at least 100 per day. Even with glossing over, I have some story wrapping up to do).

So, in celebration, I give you another excerpt! This is way, way unedited. Meet my major villain, Eric Morrow, “The Shadow Man”:

Thanks to a quick internet search, he found his boys in the Saint Michael Medical Center morgue. They’d been taken there after someone called in a fight to the police, and the police had showed up to find two headless bodies. Someone had figured out, or been very lucky in guessing, that his boys were healers. Unless Mar had bragged about it. Sometimes his boasting got the better of him.

Eric showed up at the morgue and told them he might be able to identify the two bodies they’d brought in two nights before. Drinking buddies, he said. The nurse on duty called a doctor, and the doctor let him know that the police were going to want to talk to him if he in fact did know the deceased. Eric said that he understood, and the doctor led him down to the morgue.

Two lockers were opened, two bodies slid out. The doctor warned him that the sight was gruesome. The autopsies weren’t complete, and their heads were still detached. Eric nodded, and the doctor unzipped the body bags. Those were his boys, all right. He looked between them and summoned up a touch of crocodile tears. “Yeah, I know them. Could I have a few minutes alone?”

“Sure. I’m sorry for your loss.” The doctor touched a hand to his shoulder and walked away. Eric waited until he heard the door close. He went to Clifford first. Reliable, steady Clifford. Eric pushed the man’s head firmly onto his neck. Would two days be too long? He waited a few seconds, studying the ragged flesh, waiting for signs of healing.

Maybe it had been too long … maybe ol’ Cliff needed a bit of magic to kick start his body. Eric looked around and found a scalpel lying on a table. He went over and grabbed it, bringing it back over to the body. Eric sliced the end of his index finger and dripped the blood onto the torn flesh of Clifford’s neck. “Come on, Clifford … wake up, my boy.” Drip, drip, drip. The drops of blood fell, bright red onto the pale flesh and dried blood of Clifford’s neck.

One small piece of flesh latched on to another. Another connection was made, and another. The flesh knit itself together faster and faster. “That’s it.” Eric smiled. Clifford’s pale, cold flesh started to warm. Eric moved on to Mar. The wound on his index finger had started to close, so he sliced it open again. Holding Mar’s head against his neck with one hand, he dripped blood onto the neatly sliced hole between neck and head. This had been done with a blade, or something very sharp. Clifford’s neck had been torn and chewed as if by an animal. The two very different methods of severing the head made Eric think that there had been at least two people involved in hurting his boys. He was very eager to find out what the story was from them.

The blood from his index finger dripped onto Mar’s neck, bright red against the pale dull colors. “Wake up, Mar. Your boss is here.” It took a little longer for the flesh to respond, reaching out to bridge the gap between head and neck. Eric watched, fascinated.

A gasp behind him, a thump, and gurgled moaning. Clifford was awake. Eric turned around and looked into the panicked wide eyes of Clifford. “Quiet, or you’ll attract attention.”

Clifford calmed and nodded to show his understanding. His neck would take at least a few more second until it was healed enough to allow him to talk. Eric turned back to Mar. In a few seconds, he drew in a gasping, ragged breath and his eyes flew open. Eric made sure that he was the first thing Mar saw. “I’m here, don’t worry. Let yourself heal.”

Mar opened his mouth, trying to speak. A rough, gurgling sound came out of his throat. Eric put a finger to his lips. “Shhh.” Mar settled down.
“Boss,” Clifford said, his voice raw. “They killed us.”

Hello! Boy, I haven’t updated in a while. I’m poking my head up from NaNoWriMo, where I’m doing well (current word count: 37,080).  I went to the 28 hour write-in tour last weekend, which was all kinds of wacky fun, although most of the words I wrote were awful. Really, really awful. Oh, well, as some of my wrimo friends say: Embrace the crap!

Here’s a quick excerpt from my novel Flight (note that since this is from Nano, it’s even MORE ‘not edited’ than usual):

“Wings.”

Vincent froze, his heart beating double time. Spinning around, he saw a girl staring at him. “You have wings,” she said.

He reached over his shoulder, patting his shoulder blades. Nothing. He stared at the girl. She smiled. “I can see them, but no one else can. You hide them, don’t you?”

Vincent glanced around, looking for a parent and seeing if anyone was paying attention to their conversation. No parent, and nobody was looking at them for more than the second it took to walk around them. He stepped closer to the girl. “How can you see my wings?”

She was about twelve or thirteen, with light brown hair tied in a braid. Shrugging, she said, “I can see things like that. Usually I can see what people _do_, but you’re the first one I’ve ever seen with wings.”

For the second time that year, Vincent felt like he’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. He stepped over to the wall to get out of the way of the foot traffic and motioned for her to do the same. “You can see my wings?”

She nodded. “They’re black, like crows’ wings. No one else has ever seen them.”

He took a shaky breath and rubbed the side of his face. Ever since the wings had first appeared, he’d been trying to hide them, afraid of how people would react. Although he wasn’t big on conspiracy theories, he couldn’t help envisioning being carted off to a secret lab. Somehow, he could make the wings disappear at will, and now here was this girl saying she could see them.

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.” She smiled. “I think they’re beautiful.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “Um, thanks.” He looked around again. People looked at them, but it was all fleeting glances. “You said you can see what people do. What does that mean?”

She tugged at the hem of her shirt. “Well, it’s only been a few times. I saw a man that could find things, and a woman that could move things by thinking about it, and another woman that can talk to the air. I think she can fly like you.”

Twilight Zone for sure. Or maybe a comic book. “So you see people with, like … super powers?”

“Sort of. It’s more like … magic.”

“Magic,” he repeated. Curiosity warred with the urge to get the hell out of here. What if one of his coworkers saw him talking to this girl? Fear won out. “Look, I’ve got to get to lunch, okay?”

She looked like she wanted to say something else, but she nodded. “Okay.”
He stood for another moment, then turned and went down the street. The urge to look behind him was strong, but he resisted. He ate half his lunch and picked at the rest, his shoulder blades itching. He focused on keeping his wings hidden, fearing as he had so many times before that if he thought about them they might appear. He thought about the girl, too, and what she’d said. She couldn’t be making it all up, because she’d been right about his wings. If she was telling the truth about that, did that mean she really _had_ seen the other people she said she had? Other people with powers as impossible as his wings.