This Brilliant Darkness excerpt

This Brilliant Darkness is a dark fantasy.  

It's a difficult work to pull excerpts from, because you move so quickly as a reader from character to character, diving head-first toward the climax from page one.  Still, here's a bit I managed to share one Sample Sunday last fall.  Hopefully you'll enjoy this peak inside the mind of our designated "baddie," the ageless monster Greachin.  (If  not, you might give it a try, anyway--maybe one of the other characters will ring your bell.)

In this sample, Greachin is still in a very young host body that he’s tailor-making to scare the wits out of our hapless heroine, Christine Grace:

It was a matter of hours before he could take flight into the darkness, on the hunt for the woman. He could manage a few miles, if he stopped to rest on the way. A few miles were all he needed.

The woman’s pulse was calling him, but not from these woods. He’d found her scent in this locale, but except for his finding a host, it had been a dead end.

Well, she’d found a dead end, too, hadn’t she?

A smile flickered across his dimpled cheeks, and faded as he turned his head in the direction of his target’s beating heart.

Christine Grace had been here, definitely, but this was not her forest.

He closed his eyes, tilting his crested head to one leathery shoulder. He could hear the rattle of branches in a canopy across the nearby town. He was on the outskirts and she waited in the center, radiating a signal that burned in him, impossible to ignore.

Her ruah beat upward and out, into the woods, her scent wrapping languidly around her own trees, then carried to him on the breeze.

Greachin hummed, unconsciously leaning into the direction of her spirit, as the woman walked briskly across a hard paved path. His ruah flapped enormous wings high above her, then dove.

Too soon. Not yet.

His small physical eyes opened, and he wrenched himself upright. He had gone too far, too fast into the scent, into the pulse. He wrapped his chubby baby legs around the branch of the ash.

An insect bored into the trunk, and Greachin leaned forward, pawing at the emerald green bug with his tender talons.

Hunger. Torture.

Eating was a trick. Greachin leaned forward on the branch, his supple lips sucking theinsect’s spindly body into his mouth, raking the exoskeleton across his burning gums. His pointed teeth strained to burst through blackening flesh.

Distasteful meal. Teething, too. The scare had better be worth it.

Greachin mused over the power of fear as he munched another emerald ash borer.

And eating.

The humans seemed to love eating, making great rituals out of it, but Greachin had never understood their celebrations. Meals, hugging, kissing, shaking hands—and the mating. Oh, what a ritual surprise that was. The fruitless mating.

Insane.

If you'd like to read more of This Brilliant Darkness, by all means, look it up on Amazon.com.  It's available as an ebook or a paperback.  I hope to finish writing the sequel in 2012, as readers have demanded!  

Thanks for reading this today, and I would love to hear your thoughts, comments, notes, etc.