Desecrated Bonds

By Rebecca Clare Smith

A crime has been committed leading to the darkest of Desecrated Bonds; but then… nothing is as it should be when you lose your good half forever, doomed always to be stalked by the ghost of your own guilt.

Drowning in death & the supernatural, our heroine has to protect herself from the destruction caused by her own dark nature & come to terms with a loss so deep it will scar her soul for eternity.

Haunted, can she save herself or will this self-imposed spectre control her fate?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katarr Kanticles Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301620036

Rebecca Clare Smith

Primarily a fantasy hound, Rebecca is an animal lover with a writing style that meanders between dystopian and urban. She lives with her pragmatic other half & their cats in the lovely UK county of Yorkshire (where tea drinking is expected & dunking biscuits is mandatory). A big fan of social media, chances are you’ll catch her online at some point during the day where she is more than happy to add readers & writers as friends. Her day job is friendlier than her plot lines might have you expect & her house is far less cluttered than her head, surprisingly. Occasionally she attempts to garden or clean, but is more often found with her face buried in new writing or the writing of others.

Book preview

Desecrated Bonds

Black eyes and parched lips meet my gaze in the vibrations of the cabinet mirror. The bottle turns over in my fingers, pills rattling inside. Just one. The rattling continues, white noise in the stillness and the silence, rain slanting the windows. Patter, patter, scratch... stab...

Stab...

Oxygen reaches my brain in a slow dissolution, memories disbanded. The world around me has finally melted in. Drums beat between the skin of my forehead and my skull, burrowing to my brain. I could take just one...

He’s still screaming behind me, but it’s not his screams that woke me.

I waver over the pills until the pitch of the phone breaks through my consciousness. A dry hello cracks my lips. It’s barely necessary. I press my ears against his screaming, trying hard to make out the caller’s voice. Bleach. I can smell bleach. My guts churn, twisting and frothing like the insides of a washing machine.

Over all of this noise I only hear two words from the phone, but they’re enough to tell me where I’m wanted and why.

A body.

The screaming turns to laughter. I don’t need to look to know his eyes are bulbous and bloodshot, his cackles wracking his chest with violent delight. Unhinged. The world wobbles in front of my eyes, threatening to cave.

He’s been here since yesterday.

A steady ache blossoms across my forehead. It seems years since we met in the coffee shop. It’s far from it. He came over, made casual chat and invited himself to sit down. Brown striped suit, shirt hanging out at the edges, straggled hair... Discomfort had nagged at me. If only I’d listened to my senses then. Instead, I’d brushed him off as an inconvenience; a folly on my part.

I mumble something into the receiver, an affirmation that I’m coming. I don’t want to go. I never do, but this time I know exactly what’s waiting