Hydra Haunting Halloween

http://www.hydrapublications.com/

Join the authors at Hydra Publications celebrating a Haunting Hydra Halloween!  Our party gift to you, books....at 99 cents!! 
Have a howling good time!

Excerpt of my mystery The Parrot Told Me, where the witness is a talking bird!

“Are you my baby bird?”  The question was pronounced in a silky smooth Southern voice.  The voice made a ripple of unease slip down her spine.

              Camille turned a page and concentrated on the printed words.

              “Hey, Bud.”  The voice insisted, this time deeper and masculine, accompanied by a loud ringing and the discordant sound of metal against metal.  “Where are you?” he demanded.

              “Hey, Simon,” Camille called back, closing her book.  Camille stood and slowly stretched.  Through the kitchen door, she could see her newest roommate pacing.  Simon was a trifle scruffy, his silver gray feathers ruffled and battered, but improving.  His red tail feathers would stay stubby and bent until he went through a molt and grew back new plumage to replace the old, but he had begun to gain weight, and he no longer flared with alarm when someone passed through the doorway.

              Camille shook her head and slipped across the room.

              “How about a little music?” she asked, switching on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  The sound filtered from the speakers, crystal clear, lovely. 

              The pacing stopped; the clang of the bell was silenced as the sensitive creature bent his head to absorb the comfort of the sound, his figure reflected in the dark glass of the window.  A bird that loved classical music.  How unique.

              Camille took her seat again, choosing a magazine from the stack on the top of the trunk.  She flipped open the glossy pages, too distracted to concentrate on her novel.  There was something inherently splendid about sitting in the half-light, the vanilla scented air rushing on warm drafts, the music washing over her like a salve.

              “What the hell?”  This time the voice was different, feminine, an edge of fear, spooky. The voice of a dead woman.

              Camille caught her breath and froze.

              “Just here for a visit.”  The voice returned an octave lower, a man with no accent, smooth.

              “Look, I don’t want to discuss it.”  The first voice again, but different.  She didn’t sound scared anymore, but cautious maybe.

              “Baby.”  The man’s voice almost crooned.

              Then there was a long pause, a pregnant silence filled only by the music. 

              “Let me go! Get away from me!”  It was the female voice again, but higher and edgier, now really afraid.  “No, stop!” Wild panic in that tone.

              The cacophony of sounds that followed showed signs of the furious struggle: pounding steps, slamming doors, an unearthly howl, a bird voice of fury as the music shut off, then a few seconds of silence before the next track began.

              Camille stumbled to her feet, the magazine sliding to the floor unheeded.  Her heart was hammering in her ears as the noise ceased, an insistent clanging melting into silence.  She reached back to the sofa for support and forced herself to breathe slowly.

              “Oh, poor bird,” the lonely creature crooned, once again in his raspy parrot voice.  “Poor Simon.”

              With her hand at her chest, sheltering her stuttering heart, she leaned forward and looked in the dining room again.  Simon was in the back of his cage, perched at his favorite spot, huddled against the walls.  His left foot was raised, his long parrot claws gently massaging his own neck.  A parrot’s self comfort.

 

The Parrot Told Me

 

 

Check out my wonderful cover for Dearly Remembered

Introducing Dearly Remembered, Book 2 in the Grave Reminders Series

I am pleased to invite my readers to take a quick glimpse of my newest published novel, Dearly Remembered.  This is the second in a series, but may also be read alone.  The book is a paranormal mystery romance set in a little town in Kentucky. 

Enjoy a nice spooky story, perfect for Halloween!

http://www.amazon.com/Dearly-Remembered-Grave-Reminders-Book-ebook/dp/B00OQINPEU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1413938276&sr=8-2&keywords=rachael+rawlings

 

A hot splash of panic hit my system half a second before my heartbeat drove out the foreign sound.   It was just too freaking dark to see anything beyond my nose, and the streetlights out the windows were almost nonexistent.  I was left in the dark, so dark that the shadows of furniture had melted into an inky stain against the white walls.  I sat up in my bed and threw the covers back, swinging my bare legs over the side of the bed and grabbing the tennis racquet resting against the bedframe.  My pounding heart had lessened slightly, and I strained to hear the sound, the sound that had driven me from my mundane dreams of home.  Again I heard it.  It wasn’t the sigh of the door, the click of the knob as it turned.  Not that.  And it wasn’t the footfalls of someone creeping outside my door.  It was more terrifying than that.  It was a whisper, softer than the breeze, begging and straining, wanting and beckoning me to do something and go somewhere that I had never been and never wished to be.  I was pretty sure Death  had come calling, and I was trying to face him off with sports equipment.

            At the doorway I stopped my hand on the cool metal of the knob.  I didn’t want to open it.  Out in the hall there was more dark, more silence, and more empty doorways.  The house wasn’t huge, but it was bigger than our own little downtown apartment had been, and most of the rooms were echo empty with warped wooden floors that would give beneath my feet, alerting anyone who cared that I was out and about with my racquet.

            I turned the knob anyway, peeking first from the crack between the door and the frame, and when I saw nothing, looking out into the wider gloom.  The hall spread out right and left, ending in a turning staircase at one end of the corridor.  At the dead end, a window leaked spare light onto the floor, moonlight that seemed to suck the color from everything around me until my own skin looked like smooth grey stone.  At the other end of that hall, at the head of the stairs, one door stood slightly ajar, my sister’s room.  I didn’t worry that she might catch me in my black rose tee shirt and bare feet, and black painted toenails looking like drops of blood pooled on the wooden floor.  She slept the heavy sleep of the exhausted and fulfilled, the sleep of someone thrown into adulthood with a brutal shove.

            I finally forced myself to move, sliding the soles of my bare feet over the cool floors.  The doors on either side of the hall were closed but for my sister’s.  Behind the heavy panels were the other bedrooms, two for my sister and me, two that sheltered dust bunnies and boogie men under the old bedframes and abandoned dressers, and one that my sister had made up into a makeshift office complete with cardboard desk.  I wouldn’t go in those.  Whoever had come into my house wasn’t some incorporeal spirit.  He wasn’t wafting through the heavy doors or seeping under the door jam.  He was real, and he had real footfalls and real hands that would need to open those doors to hide inside.  And that I would have heard.  This antique house was eerily quiet at rest, but put a living body in it, and it squealed, squeaked, groaned, and protested as though inconvenienced by our presence.  I would have heard any of the doors opening.

            I was speeding up now.  I raced down the steps, the racquet held in front of me, my hand skimming the wooden rail.  All I could hear now were my own footsteps and the house responding to my weight.  My breathing was unnaturally loud in my ears, and my heart was a more subtle thunder.  At the bottom of the stairs I paused at the landing.  To the right was the dining room, empty but for a towering stack of boxes still unpacked since the move and some forgotten pieces of furniture we hadn’t decided what to do with yet.  Behind that was the kitchen, the only slightly updated room in the place, with its eighties wallpaper and Formica countertops.  To my left was the parlor, perfect for greeting gentlemen callers a hundred years ago, but now a little bit of wasted space until we could figure out what to do with the room.  The living room behind that was generous for the age of the house, but the piece of carpet we had thrown on the floor would hide any sounds of footsteps if the intruder went there.  Could that be why it was silent now?  Was he waiting in the gloom, still enough to cover his presence with silence?

            I went toward the living room.  The kitchen had a doorway to the backyard through a mudroom, and since the kitchen and living room shared a wall and a doorway, it was the easiest way out of the house besides the front door straight ahead of me.  If he was still in the house, I could only hope that he was seeking an exit and was moving toward it.  I slipped into the parlor, keeping my back to the wall and my eyes so wide that I felt blind.  I followed the plaster wall, skimming my fingertips over the uneven surface that we still meant to paint, and moved toward the living room.  A stingy glow of light came from the back where a neighbor had an outdoor light hung on the rear of his garage.  It cast uneven shadows across the dark floors and lighter carpet.  I stopped in the living room door and stood for a long moment in the silence.

            “Give it up, little girl,” the whisper moved in the darkness, so close but not.  A brush of something on my arm, the distinct feeling of warmth of another human so close, and then gone.  I spun like a dancer that I would never be, racquet held out with both hands, feet set apart and firm for my stance.  But I knew before I finished my turn that the room was empty.  There was no one there.  And the door never opened.

 

---

 

Dearly Departed - the new cover reveal

I have debated about my covers for my books extensively, but have adopted a new cover for Dearly Departed in order to have a matching set for the trilogy of Grave Reminders.  Let me know what you all think!!

Best Android Wear Apps - September Edition (Part 1)

Redesigned blog!!

I have also redesigned the look of my blog...take a moment and tell me what you think!!

Dearly Departed.....Celebrating my book signing

I am thrilled to have two local opportunities to sign my newly released print book this coming weekend.  To celebrate, I am going to put a short sample of my book for everyone to read and enjoy.

Today is Dearly Departed, the first in the Grave Reminders series.

I traced a single finger down the windowpane and watched as a mark of clear glass appeared in the fog, beads of moisture clinging to the glass.  The silence of the house was broken by the creak of time in the old timbers of the pitched roof, and the steady drip, drip, drip of the bathroom faucet down the hall.  The night outside was rapidly cooling; inconsistent fall weather going from a pleasant mid-seventies to the forties in a matter of hours.  My breath made another oval of misty white against the night’s darkness.  I pressed slightly closer to the glass, the window's mirror image of my room disappearing as I focused beyond the glass.

Outside, the graveyard was largely unlit, partially to dissuade more timid visitors after sunset, but more out of respect for the neighborhood homes crowded like concerned aunts around the parameter of the grounds.  The regular inhabitants of the yard, under their snug carpet of soil and lawn, cared little for light or dark.  Under the protective limbs of oaks and maples, their leaves burned gold, orange, and rosy red, the grave stones cast moonlit shadows on the ground.  Amid the steady swaying of the trees, a pale figure passed silently.

            “You’re here again,” I said.  I pulled the thick material of my sweatshirt over the heel of my hand and wiped a wide swath of moisture from the pane.  The view cleared, snatching reality from the ghostly blur. My second story window gave me an excellent view over the four foot creek stone wall into the adjoining cemetery.  This was my opportunity for the nightly viewing of assorted activities that took place in one of the county’s oldest monuments.

            Visitors, even late night ones, were not so unusual.  I’d been the silent guardian for a long time, spying through my curtains for almost 15 years, after my parents had chosen to move to the historic little town when I was just two.  Since then, I had knelt in childhood curiosity, my knees padded with the skirts of my long flannel gowns, and all that time I had felt somehow privileged to be the protector of those even more vulnerable than myself.  But this visitor was different.  He made me watch.  For two weeks straight I had seen him here, walking slowly and deliberately through the grounds like an unsettled spirit.  His pattern was always the same, starting at the gated entrance where he appeared after vaulting over the stone wall and moving into the center circle.  From there he moved either right or left, sometimes disappearing into the damp shade of the oaks, sometimes behind the shelter of the chapel.  He was always in darkness, always clinging in the shadows as they caressed his figure, blending him and shielding him from probing eyes.  This was the first time he had stilled, and my breath caught as I watched through the damp glass.

            The window was fogging again as I leaned closer to watch the tall figure pause.  For a moment, I saw the pale oval of his face framed by paler hair worn too long.

            My indecision melted when I saw him raise one hand in a casual wave.  He had seen me.

            “Alright,” I muttered to myself.  “Time to face up.”

 

http://ow.ly/CHOla

 

Writing for Fun

I started writing my story, Talitha, when I was a young mother living in J-Town, on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky.  Close by my house was a street named Talitha, and although I never knew why, I really liked that name.  I adopted it as the name of a haunted house and started to craft the story.  Fast forward years later.  I have started serious editing of my original novel, beefing up the characters, pouring over the plot, and bringing it more up to date.  And although that may sound kind of boring, I have surprised myself how much I have enjoyed reading the story.  Its October, Halloween is coming, and spooky is in the air.  What better time to read a scary story!  Especially one that you can make as scary as you want it, pull out and put in bits, change characters, challenge characters, and like a grand puppet master, make them all bow to your evil whims.....
Oh, sorry, got a little carried away there.
But in truth, writing can be very fun.  It's like writing a movie in your mind, one that you can start, stop, and alter at any moment.
Take a moment, write a story, and share!
Boo!