by Declan Finn
“Slowly, and with WD-40.” He chuckled and sat. “Well, vampires…on the one end, you have the original mythology. Even in the Middle East, with the Ghul–their name for a vampire, singular–they were a type of undead, possibly demon spawn. They survived by drinking blood and could shape-shift. They also hung out in cemeteries. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? When you get to the European version, they could be repelled by crosses and sunlight and stakes, that sort of thing. Those stories, at least partially, take into account the existence of Free Will.”
“Free will?”
He leaned back against the bench, his arms spreading out along the back. “Think about it. Almost every traditional vampire in fiction is evil, automatically and with little in the way of reservation. Turn a good human being into a vampire, and they’re automatically not much better than your average rabid dog. In the original novel, aside from Dracula and his three girlfriends in the basement, there was only one other vampire. That was Lucy, the girlfriend of Mina Harker. As a new vampire, she could have been easily controlled, or feral, or what have you. Now, the original Vlad the Impaler, who inspired the fictional Dracula, was not a nice fellow. Take that how you want.
“When you get into more recent novels, everything becomes a mishmash, usually with bad metaphysics. Laurell K. Hamilton is one of the worst offenders—practically everything she does is conditional. You know, vampires are dead during the day, unless it’s a powerful vampire, which depends on a whole bunch of factors I’m not even totally certain of.” He paused, then smiled. “Sorry, I over think sometimes. Hence the freak portion.”
“I still do not agree,” Amanda said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “You are intense, but not freakish.”
“I’m a freak who reads too many books. I don’t sleep with everything that has a skirt, especially since I go to school near Greenwich Village. I live in Brooklyn and don’t sound like Tony Danza. I can go on forever.”
She patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry. Those things do not make you freakish.”
Keep reading HONOR AT STAKE right now!
One is a heartless, bloodthirsty killer. The other is a vampire.
A 2016 Dragon Award Finalist
Amanda Colt spends her days alone. She prefers solitude to other people, rarely finding anyone to catch her interest. Books and fencing fill her time.
Until she meets Marco. He doesn’t fit in, just like her. In fact, he seems to be a man out of time. With medieval manners, a gang that fears him, and a mind like a computer, Amanda has never met anyone like him. But for all his magnetic appeal, she can tell he’s hiding something from her.
But Amanda has a secret too. And as she and Marco grow closer, it plunges them into New York’s supernatural underworld. Marco brings mayhem and romance to Amanda’s serene world, and she finds herself falling for him, faults and all.
Bodies are turning up all over New York. Only Amanda and Marco can stem the flow of corpses, and more and more vampires are rising every night.
Can Amanda and Marco save New York?
Or even scarier, admit their growing feelings for one another?
Join Amanda and Marco as they fight legions of newly born Vampires in Brooklyn. Read Honor At Stake today!
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to start by thanking all of the usual suspects.
Gail and Margaret Konecsni of Just Write! Ink, Hans Schantz, Jim McCoy, Daniel Humphreys, Russell and Morgon Newquist, and L. Jagi Lamplighter—for all of the edits, suggestions, reviews and encouragement.
Thanks to all of the Kickstarter backers who made these awesome covers possible.
Thanks to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International Facebook group for the gun data. Any mistakes are mine, as always.
And, as always, Vanessa.
I’d like to note that the references used over the course of this book include The Rite by Matt Baglio and An Exorcist Tells His Story by Father Amorth.
All of the prayers I use in here are real. Though some are edited and spliced together for dramatic purposes. Some include Psalms 17, 35, 54 and 63, hike! Also, the exorcism prayer of Pope Leo XIII.
What I do to Essex, Massachusetts, is fictional. Every place is fictional, even the geographic locations. If you think that you know a person/place/thing that exists in Essex, please let me know. I will pretend that I meant to do that.
While I think about it, there is a brief mention of Sri Lanka here. The experience of how the information was disseminated is real, and taken from my own experience.
About Declan Finn
Declan Finn lives in a part of New York City unreachable by bus or subway. Who’s Who has no record of him, his family, or his education. He has been trained in hand to hand combat and weapons at the most elite schools in Long Island, and figured out nine ways to kill with a pen when he was only fifteen. He escaped a free man from Fordham University’s PhD program, and has been on the run ever since. There was a brief incident where he was branded a terrorist, but only a court order can unseal those records, and really, why would you want to know?
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DEUS VULT
ST. TOMMY, NYPD BOOK SIX
By Declan Finn
Published by Silver Empire
https://silverempire.org/
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover by Steve Beaulieu
Copyright © 2019, John Konecsni
All rights reserved.
