Dead Blind (Jack of Spades Two)

By Lee Brazil

In the two months since Dr. Sabine Brusilov and his ghostly lover Bart discovered the curious brass circlet while investigating a haunting in an apartment building, Sabine focused on recovering from his accident. Now, his health restored, his mind returns to the mystery of the circlet. Even a commission to appear on a television show can’t distract him from its allure.

After nearly two centuries of resistance, it takes an exorcism for Bart to come to terms with being a ghost...and learning that everything in the other realm isn’t quite the way he had figured. As he grows more comfortable in the spirit plane, his abilities on the earthly plane evolve. Even though he feels the circlet’s evil, he can’t help but connect his growing strength with it.

Life and death are two sides of the same coin, but the circlet blurs lines for both man and ghost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Brazil
• Release date: Apr 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310747359

Lee Brazil

Somewhere in a small town in up-state New York are a librarian and a second grade teacher to whom I owe my life. That might be a touch dramatic, but it's nevertheless one hundred percent true. Because they taught me the joy of reading, of escaping into worlds crafted of words. Have you ever been nine years old and sure of nothing so much as that you don't belong? Looked at the world from behind glasses, and wondered why you don't fit? Then turn the page and see… there you are, running from Injun Joe in a dark graveyard; there you are fencing with Athos; there you are…beneath the deep blue sea- marveling at exotic creatures with Captain Nemo. I found myself between the pages of books, and that is why I write now, it's why I taught English and literature for so many years, and it's why my house contains more pounds of books than furniture. If I'd had my way, I'd have been a fencer…or a starship captain, or a lawyer, or a detective solving crimes. But instead, I am a writer, and that's the best thing in the world to be if you ask me, because as a writer, I can be all those things and more. If I hadn't learned to value the stories between the pages, who knows what would have happened? Certainly not college…teaching…or writing.

Book preview

In the two months since Dr. Sabine Brusilov and his ghostly lover Bart discovered the curious brass circlet while investigating a haunting in an apartment building, Sabine focused on recovering from his accident. Now, his health restored, his mind returns to the mystery of the circlet. Even a commission to appear on a television show can’t distract him from its allure.

After nearly two centuries of resistance, it takes an exorcism for Bart to come to terms with being a ghost…and learning that everything in the other realm isn’t quite the way he had figured. As he grows more comfortable in the spirit plane, his abilities on the earthly plane evolve. Even though he feels the circlet’s evil, he can’t help but connect his growing strength with it.

Life and death are two sides of the same coin, but the circlet blurs lines for both man and ghost.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. As such, any resemblance to any persons, living or deceased, businesses, events, or locales is coincidental.

Copyright Feb. 2015 © Lee Brazil

Editing by Jae Ashley

Cover Photography by Eugenio Marongiu

Cover Design by Laura Harner

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

Trademark Acknowledgements:

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following trademarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

Google: Google, Inc.

Pulp Friction 2015: Altered States

Dead Blind

Jack of Spades 2

By

Lee Brazil

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Jack of Spades #2

Dead Blind

Chapter One

A fan of red and black cards lay on the scarred tabletop…smoke and laughter and raucous piano music tainted the air. Every fiber of his being focused on the neat little derringer held oh so casually in an elegant white hand.

Let’s not be hasty. The scarlet-clad tart clutched at her lover’s shoulder, wrinkling the black fabric of his coat.

He’s a cheat. The man’s attention never wavered. I can’t abide a cheat.

You keep it. Bart gestured negligently at the pile of bills and coins in the center of the table. No hard feelings. The money was his…legitimately won. A year ago the slur on his honor would have had him reaching for his own piece, but now, he’d learned life was more valuable than honor.

You know. The gambler leaned forward, dark eyes glittering maliciously. I think I will.

His heart tripped in long, slow, painful thumps, sweat ran like ice cold rain along his back. Bart stared down the barrel of that pistol…and even though he expected it, the sound of its report shocked him.

Fuck. The painful thumps burst outward…spears of fire raced through his veins. He might have screamed…he definitely cursed. Scattered in a hundred directions at once, pulling back together, seeking something to anchor him, to draw on. In the all-encompassing darkness, he found it…a pinprick of light, of familiarity. Ignoring the cluster of brightness that called to him most strongly, knowing that cluster represented Sabine, represented a home grown uncomfortable. Zeroing his consciousness on the chosen spot, Bart didn’t care where it took him, as long as it was somewhere where his own death didn’t whisper to him so pervasively. Since Sabine’s accident, he hadn’t been able to escape that constant, chiding reminder of mortality.

Fuck. His atoms coalesced again…coming together more solidly than he’d planned. Where was he? Somewhere not Sabine’s apartment. Somewhere that held its own darkness, but more the darkness of sorrow than the strange unsettling feeling that seemed to have followed them home from Mrs. Carew’s apartment.

What am I supposed to do with this?

Jet’s voice… He’d found the wolf in the frenzy of darkness. The Alpha sat slumped over a desk littered with paper and ledgers of some kind. His strong dark fingers clutched Bart’s pocket watch tightly. He bore very few reminders of the battle for pack leadership that Bart had witnessed two weeks earlier, rapid healing was apparently a boon to the curse of the wolf.

Not that Jet or any of his family seemed to consider being wolfen a curse. From the perspective of death, Bart could well believe that it was, in fact, a blessing.

A hundred seventy-five years ago, had he possessed the agility and instinct of the