Soothsayer Ch. 11, Pt. 2

Notes: Okay, so we dive hardcore into more plotty stuff next week, but this is all still relevant. And also, for those who read the below and think to themselves "That's not how people camp," oh yes it is. In my family, tents are for wusses. Even in the winter, we've built snow caves over sleeping in tents. Every summer backpacking trip I've ever taken with my dad, who is a former Army Ranger, we've slept under strategically-tied tarps on sleeping bags and pads. In his older age he's condescended to add an air mattress for the sake of his hips, but the rest of it? Rain or wind or mosquito season, it's plastic tarps. Yep. I like it a lot more than these guys do, though :)


Title: Soothsayer Chapter Eleven, Part Two.

 ***

                Don’t get me wrong. I was not, and had never been, big into the “great outdoors.” My mother might have liked roughing it in a little cabin with unreliable electricity, and I may have spent more than my fair share of time tied up in uncomfortably rural locations, but I’d never enjoyed it. It wasn’t the sort of thing I put up with for enjoyment, it was what happened when there were no other options and I had to suck it up. I figured it would be second nature for Sören, though. After all, he was a freaking landvættir. If getting comfy on the actual land wasn’t a part of that, I didn’t know what was.

                Living in ignorance was way better than finding out the truth.

Soothsayer Ch. 7, Pt. 1

Notes: I know this isn't the longest post, but I'm setting a lot of stuff up. Plus, wow, it's been a busy week and we've barely started! Full Credit is up in Spanish on the blog (see the right hand side under Pages), I just got cover art for an anthology I'm in that gets released next month (more on that later) and we can't forget last week's Academy vignette, which apparently a lot of people liked. Thank you! For now, though, on with Cillian and Sören, or...whatever is in the trunk.

Also, I'm sorry, all my Icelandic comes from translation sites, I apologize if there are egregious errors.

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter 7, Part 1.

***

“Your voice has haunted every inch of my soul since the last time I heard it…my world had been so dark, void of sound and then I heard you sing again—and it exploded.” – Cassandra Giovanni, Finding Perfection

                It took for fucking ever to get out of Chicago. Seriously, I don’t know how they even called it all Chicago, it was like, “Oh, the city center!” and then hours’ worth of suburbs before the highway suddenly spit me out into farmland. I could smell the cow shit from here, and it was not lovely. I would stand out like a five-alarm fire in one of these little farming towns, not that I expected the Egilsson family to be on my tail quite yet. Still, Andre was right. I needed to sleep, and that meant I needed to stop for a while. Sören was safe in the trunk—god, and I hated that he was stuffed back in the trunk but there really was no good way to explain the functional equivalent of a corpse to someone if they happened to look inside.

  

Soothsayer Ch. 4, Pt. 2

Notes: So, this is the last moment of development before we jump ahead to the Windy City. It's going to get interesting, folks:) Also, today is Lisa T's birthday--happy birthday, darlin'! Lisa is prompter, cheerleader, commenter and queen extraordinaire, and I'm so glad that this post falls on her day. I hope you, and everyone else, is enjoying the journey.


Title: Soothsayer, Chapter 4, Part 2

***



 Not my picture, of course, but I couldn't resist another CIllian shot before we head out. If only his hair was blonde...

“All journeys have a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

I really only had one call to make, and that was to the author of the article on Egilsson. Andre Jones was a multi-tasker, I had to give him that. He’d written about half the articles in this month’s Modern Parapsychia, in addition to posting articles on completely different subjects on two different news blogs. He was a freelancer, willing to go almost anywhere to get a story, including a three-month stint in Turkey last year that led to a piece that was picked up by Rolling Stone. We’d chatted a little bit before he’d interviewed me, and he was a surprisingly relaxed guy, not dogmatic or demanding about how he expected things to go. He didn’t ask me to do any parlor tricks to prove I was psychic, but he didn’t go out of his way to debunk the idea either. It had been pretty balanced, all things considered, which was why I didn’t think he’d reject me out of hand for asking about his sources for the other article.

Soothsayer Ch. 4, Pt. 1

Notes: So, some revelations here! Some frustrations, especially for Cillian, but I never claimed he was super mature :) Also a new piece of artwork courtesy of Caitlin Ricci, because she's wonderful. One more post with set-up, and then we're off and running at the speed of...well, my plots, so take the word "speed" with a grain of salt.

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter Four, Part One

***



Neither of my companions were the sort of people to look dumbfounded after hearing something that should be impossible, they’d each seen too much. If I’d been hoping for a moment of shocked awe, maybe a frisson of fear or two, I’d have been sorely disappointed. As it was I got ruthless practicality, which was exactly what I needed in the moment. I was already freaking myself out. I didn’t need to deal with their panic too.

“What are you talking about?” Marisol snatched the phone from me and looked at the picture. “What do you mean? Who’s Ólafur Egilsson, and why would he be dead?”

Soothsayer Ch. 3, Pt. 2

Notes: Here we go marching on, finally getting a little of the main plot going! I know this one will leave some of your frustrated, but I swear it's getting better. We're closer and closer to our primary conflict every day, and I'm having a huge amount of fun with this. One of the great things about urban fantasy as a genre is the freedom it encourages when thinking about mythology and magic, and I've got some fun ahead. Thanks, Iceland!

Also included this time around: a custom sketch of Marisol, courtesy of the phenomenal Nico Baum, whose art you can find here on Tumblr: http://n4ut.tumblr.com/. Thank you! So, who should I commission next, guys? Phin? Roger? Maybe the mysterious he? Leave a comment and let me know!


Title: Soothsayer, Chapter 3, Part Two.

***



“Only after disaster can we be resurrected.” – Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Dreams were always a problem for me, but dreaming of him was the worst. I’d made a lot of bad decisions in my life, poor choices that couldn’t just be explained away with youth and stupidity, but the things I did with him were far and away the most shameful moments of my life. I could try and excuse it by saying that I was a captive, trying to escape before the Viking patriarch of that twisted little family lost patience and did away with me. I could say that my mother had failed me by not letting me know about the danger I was about to get into before I was tumbling into it, head over heels. I could say that he should have been the one to bear the shame, since he was technically free while I was the one imprisoned, but all of that would be lies, awful, facetious. The truth is…the truth is, I saw an opportunity in Sören’s eyes, and I took it.

Soothsayer Ch. 3, Pt. 1

Notes: Onward! And I also get to share the artwork with you, yay! I love this picture of Cillian, done by the exceptional Felixandria/Alex: find her work here: http://felixandria.tumblr.com/  It's obviously Cillian on a better day than the one he just had, but I love the sense of movement she imbued him with.  Next time around I should have another picture done by a different artist. I'm working my way through the cast :)

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter 3, Part 1

***



“No friendship is an accident.” – O. Henry, Heart of the West

It wasn’t the impact of the bullet that knocked me over; it was me trying to move too quickly on the slippery, glass-covered mess of a floor. My shoes were pretty things, but the tread had worn away long ago. The bullet hit my arm, I jerked and slid and wound up flat on my ass, and after that, well…things got a little hazy for a bit.

I’d never been shot before. Beaten until I was nothing but red blood over purple bruises, burned more than once with the business end of a cigarette, slashed with everything from chicken wire to Bowie knives, I was well acquainted with the sight of my own blood. But being shot was novel, and I stared in surprise at the perfectly round hole in my shirt, just above and outside of my elbow, as it slowly changed from white to red. Gravity pulled the blood down, staining my sleeve in pretty patterns like some perverse Rorschach card, and I just stared and ignored the sudden furor around me, people yelling and Phin bellowing like a bull, and I didn’t feel anything at all until long fingers turned my head and Roger’s blurry face swam into focus.

Soothsayer Ch. 1, Pt. 2

Notes: Chapter One, Part Two! Damn, this got long, nearly 3k. But some stories just can't be rushed, and this is turning into one of them. Have a picture of Marisol in her fortune-telling getup, and fyi none of the pics except for the one with last week's story belong to me. I hope you enjoy:)

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter One, Part Two

***

Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly...

“Nothing prevents us being natural so much as the desire to appear so.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

You know what they say: dress to impress. The way you look has a lot to do with how you’re going to be treated, and at this point in my life I was better than a goddamn boy scout at being prepared. For most of the people in this business, your appearance is just part of the con. You look mysterious, exotic, special and strange, and you’re going to have more credence to the average consumer than a housewife in a terrycloth robe and hair curlers. I’m not saying I believed that, I’d had my ass handed to me by more than one unassuming face, but I did believe in the efficacy of the right presentation.